27. Fundamentals of Therapy: Typical Cases of Illness
Tr. E. A. Frommer, J. Josephson Rudolf Steiner |
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Also the mother of the child, and the mother's sister. Diagnosis led us from the illness of the child to that of her mother and of the sister. |
On the first day after arrival home the child had a convulsion, which recurred daily for the next two months. During the attacks the child became stiff, with the eyes deviated. |
This showed itself in the uselessness on the right side in the child. We had now to relate the condition of the child to that of the mother. The latter was thirty-seven years old when she came to us. |
27. Fundamentals of Therapy: Typical Cases of Illness
Tr. E. A. Frommer, J. Josephson Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 1 ] In this chapter we shall describe a number of cases from the practice of the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute at Arlesheim. They will show how, with the help of a knowledge of spiritual man, it is possible to achieve such a thorough picture of the disease that diagnosis directly teaches us the remedy which should be used. Fundamental to this is a view which recognizes the process of illness and of healing as one complete cycle. The illness begins with an irregularity in the composition of the human organism with respect to its parts, which have been described in this book. It has already reached a certain stage when the patient is received for treatment. Our object must now be to bring about a reversal of all the processes which have taken place in the organism since the beginning of the illness, so that we arrive at length at the previous state of health of the organism. A process of this kind, reversing on itself, cannot be accomplished without the organism as a whole undergoing some loss in the forces of growth, which are equivalent to those forces which the human organism - needs during childhood in order to increase in size. The therapeutic substances must therefore be so composed as not only to bring the diseased process back to its starting-point, but also to support the reduced vitality again. To some extent this latter effect must be left to dietary treatment. But as a general rule, in the more serious cases of illness, the organism is not in a condition to evolve sufficient vitality in the assimilation of its food. Therefore the actual treatment will also have to be constituted so as to give the organism the necessary support in this respect. In the typical remedies supplied by our clinical/therapeutic institutes, this provision has been made throughout. Hence it will only be realized on closer inspection, why a given preparation contains particular constituents. In estimating the course of the disease, not only the localized pathological process, but the changes suffered by the organism as a whole must be considered and included in the reversing process. How this is to be conceived in detail will be shown by the individual cases we shall now describe. We shall then continue the more general considerations. First Case[ 2 ] A twenty-six years old woman patient. The whole personality reveals an extraordinarily labile condition. It is clear from the patient that that part of the organism, which we have here called the astral body, is in a state of excessive activity. One observes that the ego-organization has only slight control over the astral body. As soon as the patient begins to do some work, the astral body develops a state of agitation. The ego-organization tries to make itself felt, but is constantly repulsed. This causes the temperature to rise in such a case. A well regulated digestion depends mainly on a normal ego-organization. The impotence of this patient's ego-organization expresses itself in an obstinate constipation. The migraine-like conditions and vomiting from which she suffers are a consequence of this disturbance in the digestive activity. In sleep, her impotent ego-organization shows itself in a deficient organic activity from below upward and impaired expiration. The consequence is an excessive accumulation of carbonic acid in the organism during sleep, which shows itself organically in palpitations on awakening; psychologically in anxiety, and screaming. Physical examination can show nothing other than a lack of those forces which bring about a regular connection of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Owing to the excessive activity of the astral body in itself, too little of its powers can flow over into the physical and the etheric. The latter, therefore, have remained too delicate in their development during the period of growth. This has shown itself on examination in the patient's slight build and weak body, and also in the fact that she complains of frequent back pain. The latter arises because in the activity of the spinal cord the ego-organization must make itself felt most. The patient talks of many dreams. The reason is that the astral body, separated in sleep from the physical and the etheric, unfolds its own excessive activity. We must start with the fact that the ego-organization needs to be strengthened and the over-activity of the astral body lowered. The former is attained by selecting a remedy that is suitable to support the weakened ego-organization in the digestive tract. Such a remedy is to be found in copper. Applied in the form of a copper ointment compress to the region of the loins, it has a strengthening effect on the deficient inner warmth coming from the ego-organization. This is observed in a reduction of the abnormal activity of the heart and the disappearance of anxiety. The excessive activity of the astral body in itself is combated by the smallest doses of lead taken orally. Lead draws the astral body together and awakens in it the forces through which it unites more intensely with the physical body and the etheric. (Lead poisoning is composed of an over-intense union of the astral with the etheric and physical bodies, so that the latter are made subject to excessive breakdown processes.) The patient recovered visibly under this treatment. Her labile condition gave way to a certain inner firmness and assurance. Her moods, recovering from their disrupted state, grew inwardly calm and contented. The constipation and back pain disappeared; likewise the migrainous conditions and the headaches. The patient's capacity for work was restored. Second Case[ 3 ] A forty-eight year old man. He had been a robust child with an active inner life. During the war, as he informed us, he had undergone a five months' treatment for nephritis and been discharged as cured. Married at the age of thirty-five, he had five healthy children; a sixth child died at birth. At the age of thirty-three, as a consequence of mental overwork, he began to suffer from depression, tiredness and apathy. These conditions increased continuously. At the same time he began to feel spiritual despair. He is confronted by questions, in which his profession—that of a teacher—appears to him in a negative light, which he cannot meet with anything positive. The illness shows an astral body which has too little affinity with the etheric and physical, and is rigid in itself. The physical and etheric bodies are thus enabled to assert their own inherent qualities. The feeling of the etheric not being rightly united with the astral body gives rise to states of depression; while the deficient union with the physical produces fatigue and apathy. That the patient is in a state of spiritual despair is due to the fact that the astral body cannot make use of the physical and the etheric. Consistently with all this, his sleep is good; for the astral body has little connection with the etheric and physical. For the same reason he has great difficulty in waking up. The astral body is loath to enter the physical. It is only in the evening, when the physical and etheric bodies are tired, that their normal union with the astral begins to take place. Therefore the patient becomes properly awake in the evening. This whole condition indicates that it is necessary first of all to strengthen the astral body in its activity. This can always be attained by giving arsenic internally in the form of a mineral water. It becomes clear that the particular individual is seen to gain more command over his body after some time. The connection between the astral and the etheric is strengthened; the depression, apathy and fatigue cease. But the physical body also, which through its long defective union with the astral has become sluggish and immobile, must be helped; this is done by giving treatment with a mild dose of phosphorous. Phosphorous supports the ego-organization, enabling it to overcome the resistance of the physical body. Rosemary baths are used to open a way out for the accumulated products of metabolism. Curative eurythmy re-establishes the harmony of the individual members of the organism (nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, motor and metabolic system), impaired as they are by the inaction of the astral body. Finally, by giving the patient elder-flower tea, the metabolism, which has gradually become sluggish owing to the inactivity of the astral body, is restored to a normal condition. We were able to observe a complete cure in this case. Third Case[ 4 ] This patient was a musician, thirty-one years old, who visited our clinic during a concert tour. He was suffering from a severe inflammatory and functional disturbance of the urinary tract, catarrhal symptoms, fever, excessive bodily fatigue, general weakness, and incapacity for work. [ 5 ] The past history of the patient showed that he had repeatedly suffered the same condition. Examination of the patient's spiritual state revealed a hypersensitive and exhausted astral body. The susceptibility of the physical and etheric body to catarrhal and inflammatory conditions was a consequence of this. Already as a child, the patient had a weak physical body, badly supported by the astral. Hence measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, whooping-cough and frequent attacks of sore throat; at the age of fourteen, there was an inflammation of the urethra, which recurred at the age of twenty-nine in conjunction with cystitis. At the age of eighteen, pneumonia and pleurisy; at twenty-nine, pleurisy again, following on an attack of influenza; and at the age of thirty, catarrhal inflammation of the frontal sinus. There is also a perpetual tendency to conjunctivitis. During the two months which he spent at our hospital the patient's temperature curve rose at first to 39.9¡C, after which, it descended, only to rise again on the fourteenth day; it then fluctuated between 37¡ and 36¡, occasionally rising above 37¡ and falling to 35¡. Such a temperature curve gives a clear picture of the changing states of the ego organisations. Such a curve arises when the effects of the semi-conscious contents of the ego-organization find expression in the warmth-processes of the physical and etheric bodies without being reduced to a normal rhythm by the astral. In this patient, the whole capacity of action of the astral body was concentrated on the rhythmic system, where it found expression in his artistic talent. The other systems fell short. As a significant result of this, the patient suffers from severe fatigue and insomnia during the summer. In the summer season, considerable demands are made upon the astral body by the outer world. Its inner capacity for activity recedes. The forces of the physical and etheric body become predominant. In the general perception of one's sense of well being, this manifests as severe fatigue. At the same time the weakened capacity for action of the astral body hinders its separation from the physical. Hence the insomnia. The deficient separation of the astral body from the etheric finds expression in anxious and unpleasant dreams, arising from the sensitivity of the etheric body to the lesions in the physical organism. Characteristically, the dreams symbolize these lesions in images of mutilated human beings. Their terrifying aspect is simply their natural quality and emphasis of feeling. As a consequence of the astral body functioning deficiently in the metabolic system, there is a tendency to constipation. And owing to the independence of the etheric body, which is too little influenced by the astral, the protein received as food cannot be completely transformed from vegetable and animal protein into human. Hence, protein is excreted in the urine, so that it is positive for albumen. If the astral body is functioning deficiently, processes will arise in the physical body which are really foreign processes in the human organism. Such processes express themselves in the formation of pus. This represents, as it were, an extra-human process within the human being. Thus in the sediment of the urine we actually find pure pus. But this formation of pus is accompanied by a parallel process in the soul. The astral body works as little psychically on the experiences of life, as it works physically on the substances of food. While extra-human substances are produced in the form of pus, mental and psychic contents of a extra-human character arise at the same time, as a keen interest in abnormal relationships of life, forebodings, premonitions and the like. We therefore set out to bring a balancing, purifying and strengthening influence to bear upon the astral body. As the ego organization is very much alive, its activity could be used, in a manner of speaking, as a carrier of the therapeutic remedy. The ego-organization, which is directed toward the external world, is most readily approached by influences whose direction is from without inward. This is achieved by the use of compresses. We first apply a compress of Melilotus, a remedy which works upon the astral body in such a way as to improve the balance and distribution of its forces, counteracting their one-sided concentration on the rhythmic system. Naturally the compresses must not be applied to that part of the body where the rhythmic system is especially concentrated. We applied them to the organs where the metabolic and motor systems are concentrated. We avoided compresses around the head, because the mood swings of the ego-organizations proceeding from the head, would have paralysed the effect. For the Melilotus to take effect, it was also necessary to assist the astral body and ego-organization, by drawing them together. This we sought to do by the addition of oxalic acid, derived from Radix bardanae. Oxalic acid works in such a way as to transform the activity of the ego-organization into that of the astral body. In addition, we gave oral remedies in very diluted doses; with the object of bringing the excretions into a regular connection with the influences of the astral body. We tried to normalise the excretions directed from the head organization by means of potassium sulphate. Those processes that depend upon the metabolic system in the narrower sense of the word, we sought to influence by potassium carbonate. We regulated the excretion of urine with Teucrium. We therefore gave a medicament, consisting of equal parts of potassium sulphate, potassium carbonate and Teucrium. The whole treatment had to reckon with a very labile balance in the whole, physical, psychical and spiritual organism. Thus we had to provide complete bed rest for physical rest, and mental quiet for spiritual balance; this alone made possible the proper interaction of the various remedies. Movement and agitation render such a complicated therapeutic process almost impossible. On completion of the treatment, the patient was restored to bodily strength and vigour, and was mentally in good condition. With such a labile state of health, it goes without saying that any external disruption may bring about a recurrence of one or another disturbance. It is part of the total treatment that in such a case such events should be avoided. Fourth Case[ 6 ] A child, who was brought to our clinic twice, first at the age of four, and then at the age of five and a half years. Also the mother of the child, and the mother's sister. Diagnosis led us from the illness of the child to that of her mother and of the sister. As for the child, we received the following information: it was a twin, born six weeks prematurely. The other twin died in the last stage of foetal life. At the age of six weeks, the child was taken ill, began to scream excessively, and was admitted to hospital. They diagnosed pyloric stenosis. The child was partly breast fed by a wet nurse and partly fed artificially. At the age of eight months it left the hospital. On the first day after arrival home the child had a convulsion, which recurred daily for the next two months. During the attacks the child became stiff, with the eyes deviated. The attacks were preceded by fear and crying. The child also squinted with the right eye and vomited before the attack began. At the age of two and a half years there was another attack lasting five hours. The child was again stiff and lay there as though dead. At the age of four there was an attack lasting half an hour. According to the report we received, this was the first attack which was seen to be accompanied by fever. After the convulsions that had followed directly on the return from hospital, the parents had noticed a paralysis of the right arm and the right leg. At two and a half the child made the first attempt to walk, but was only able to step out with the left leg, dragging the right after it. The right arm, too, remained without volition. The same state prevailed when the child was brought to us. Our first concern was to determine the condition of the child with respect to the members of the human organization. This was attempted independently of the syndrome. We found a severe atrophy of the etheric body, which, in certain parts, received only a very slight influence from the astral body. The region of the right chest was as though paralysed in the etheric body. On the other hand, there was a kind of hypertrophy of the astral body in the region of the stomach. The next thing was to establish the relation between this diagnosis and the syndrome. There could be no doubt that the astral body strongly involved the stomach during the process of digestion, which, however, owing to the paralysed condition of the etheric body was blocked at the transition from the gut to the lymph. Hence the blood was under-nourished. We thus attached great importance to the symptoms of nausea and vomiting. Convulsions always occur when the etheric body becomes atrophied and the astral gains a direct influence over the physical without the mediation of the etheric body. This was present to the greatest extent in the child. Moreover, if, as in this case, the condition becomes permanent during the period of growth, those processes which prepare the motor system to receive the will normally fail to take place. This showed itself in the uselessness on the right side in the child. We had now to relate the condition of the child to that of the mother. The latter was thirty-seven years old when she came to us. At the age of thirteen, she told us, she had already reached her present size. She had bad teeth at an early age, and had suffered in childhood from rheumatic fever, and maintained that she had had rickets. Menstruation began comparatively early. At the age of sixteen she had had a disease of the kidneys and she told of convulsive conditions which she had had. At twenty-five she had constipation owing to cramp in the sphincter ani, which had to be stretched. Even now she suffered from cramp on defaecation. Diagnosis by direct observation, without drawing any conclusions from this syndrome, revealed a condition extraordinarily similar to that of the child. But everything appeared in a far milder form. We must bear in mind that the human etheric body has its special period of development between the change of teeth and puberty. In the mother this expressed itself thus: with their deficient strength, the available forces of the etheric body enabled growth to take place only until puberty. At puberty the special development of the astral body begins and, being hypertrophied, now overwhelms the etheric body and takes hold of the physical organization too intensely. This showed itself in the arrest of growth at the thirteenth year. The patient was, however, by no means dwarf-like, on the contrary, she was very big; this was because the growth forces of the etheric body, deficient though they were, had worked uninhibited by the astral body and so brought about a large expansion of the volume of the physical body. But these forces had not been able to enter properly into the functions of the physical body. This showed itself in the appearance of rheumatic fever and, at a later stage, convulsions. Owing to the weakness of the etheric body there was a particularly strong influence of the astral body on the physical. Now this influence is a disintegrating one. In the course of normal development it is balanced by the regenerative forces during sleep, when the astral body is separated from the physical and the etheric. If, as in this case, the etheric body is too weak, the result is an excess of disintegration, which showed itself in the fact that she had the first filling already in the twelfth year. Moreover, if great demands are made on the etheric body as in pregnancy, on every such occasion the condition of the teeth grows worse. The weakness of the etheric body with respect to its connection with the astral was also shown by the frequency of the patient's dreams and by the sound sleep which she enjoyed in spite of all irregularities. Again the weakness of the etheric body shows itself in that foreign processes unmastered by the etheric take place in the physical body, and reveal themselves in the urine as protein, isolated hyaline casts, and salts. [ 7 ] Very remarkable was the relationship of these disease-processes in the mother with those of her sister. As to the composition of the members of the human being, diagnosis revealed almost exactly the same. A feebly working etheric body and hence a preponderance of the astral. The astral body was, however, weaker than that of the mother. Accordingly, menstruation had begun early as in the former case, but instead of inflammatory conditions she had only pains due to an irritation of the organs, e.g. the joints. In the joints the etheric body must be particularly active if the vitality is to go on in the normal way. If the activity of the etheric body is weak, that of the physical body will predominate, a fact which appeared in this case in the swollen joints and in chronic arthritis. The weakness of the astral body, that did not work enough in the subjective feeling, was indicated by her liking for sweet dishes, which enhanced the experience of the astral body. When the weak astral body is exhausted at the end of the day, then, if the weakness persists, the pains will increase in intensity. Thus the patient complained of increased pain in the evening. The connection between the pathological conditions of these three patients points to the generation preceding that of the two sisters, and more especially to the grandmother of the child. It is here that the real cause must be sought. The disordered equilibrium between the astral and etheric bodies in all three patients can only have been founded in a similar condition in the grandmother of the child. This irregularity must have been due to a deficiency of the embryonic organs of nutrition, especially the allantois development by the astral and etheric bodies of the grandmother. A deficient development of the allantois must be looked for in all three patients. We determined this to begin with by purely spiritual-scientific methods. The physical allantois, passing into the spiritual realm, is metamorphosed into the effectiveness of the forces of the astral body. A degenerated allantois gives rise to a lessened efficiency of the astral body, which will express itself, especially, in all the motor organs. Such was the case in all three patients. It is indeed possible to recognize, from the constitution of the astral body that of the allantois. From this it will be seen that our reference to the preceding generation was not the result of drawing far-fetched conclusions, but of real spiritual-scientific observations. [ 8 ] To anyone who is irritated by this fact, we would say that our statements here are not inspired by any love of paradox; rather by the wish not to withhold existing knowledge from anyone. Conceptions of heredity will always remain dark and mystical, as long as we shrink from recognizing the metamorphosis from the physical to the spiritual and vice-versa, which takes place in the sequence of the generations. [ 9 ] Therapeutically, such an insight could of course only lead us to perceive the right starting-point for a healing process. Had not our attention thus been drawn to the hereditary aspect, had we merely observed the irregularity in the connection between the astral and etheric bodies, we should have used therapeutic substances which affect both these members of the human being. Such remedies however would have been ineffective in our case, for the damage, running through the generations, was too deep-seated to be made good within the etheric and astral bodies themselves. In a case like this, one must work on the organization of the ego; here it is, that one must bring to bear all those influences which relate to a harmonizing and strengthening of the etheric and astral bodies. One can achieve this if one gains access to the ego-organization through intensified sensory stimuli, (Sensory stimuli work upon the ego-organization.) For the child, we attempted this in the following way: we bandaged the right hand with a 5% iron pyrites ointment and simultaneously we massaged the left half of the head with ointment of Amanita caesarea. Externally applied, pyrites, compound of iron and sulphur, has the effect of stimulating the ego-organization to make the astral body more alive and increase its affinity to the etheric. The Amanita substance, with its peculiar content of organized nitrogen, gives rise to an influence proceeding from the head, which, working through the ego-organization, makes the etheric body more alive and increases its affinity to the astral. The healing process was supported by curative eurythmy, which moves the ego-organization as such into quickened activity. This brings what is externally applied into the depths of the organization. Initiated in this way, the healing process was then intensified, with remedies making the astral and etheric bodies especially sensitive to the influence of the ego-organization. In rhythmic daily succession we gave a decoction of solidago in baths, massaged the back with a decoction of Stellaria media and gave orally willow bark tea (which particularly affects the receptivity of the astral body) and stannum 0.001 (which particularly makes the etheric body receptive). We also gave diluted doses of poppy juice, to allow the damaged organization to give place to the healing influences. In the mother's case, the latter kind of treatment was mainly adopted, since the inherited forces had worked far less than in the succeeding generation. The same applied to the sister of the mother. While the child was still with us in the clinic, we established that it became more easily guided and the general psychological condition was improved. It grew far more obedient, for example; movements which it had carried out very clumsily, it now accomplished with greater skill. Subsequently the aunt reported that a great change had taken place in the child. It had grown quieter and the excess of involuntary movements had decreased; the child is now sufficiently adroit to be able to play by itself, psychologically the former obstinacy has disappeared. Fifth Case[ 10 ] A woman patient, twenty-six years old, came to our clinic suffering from the serious consequences of influenza and bronchitis which she had undergone in 1918; this had been preceded in 1917 by pleurisy. Following the influenza, she had never properly recovered. In 1920 she was very emaciated and weak, with a slight temperature and night sweats. Soon after the influenza, back-pains began, which worsened continuously up to the end of 1920. Then, with violent pain, a curvature in the lumbar region became apparent. At the same time there was a swelling of the right forefinger. A rest cure had considerably lessened the back-pains. When the patient came to us, she was suffering from a cold abscess on the right thigh; her body was distended with slight ascites. There were catarrhal sounds over the apices of both lungs. Digestion and appetite were good. The urine was concentrated, with traces of protein. Spiritual-scientific investigation revealed a hypersensitivity of the astral body and the ego-organization; such an abnormality expresses itself to begin with in the etheric body, which produces, in place of the etheric functions proper, an etheric impress of the astral functions. The astral functions are destructive. Thus, the vitality and the normal process of the physical organs showed themselves to be stunted. This is always connected with processes occurring to some extent outside man, but taking place in the human organism. Hence the cold abscess, the lumbar pains, the distended abdomen, the catarrhal symptoms in the lungs, and also the deficient assimilation of protein. The treatment must therefore seek to reduce the sensitivity of the astral body and the ego-organization. This may be done by administering silicic acid, which always strengthens the inherent forces against sensitivity. In this case we gave powdered silicic acid in the food and in enemata. We also diverted the sensitivity by applying mustard plasters to the lower back. The effect of this depends upon the fact that it induces sensitivity of its own accord, thus relieving the astral body and ego-organization of theirs. By a process which damps down the over-sensitivity of the astral body in the digestive tract, we were able to divert the astral activity to the etheric body where it ought normally to be. We achieved this by minute doses of copper and carbo animalis. The possibility that the etheric body might withdraw from the normal activity of digestion, to which it was unaccustomed, was countered by administering pancreatic fluid. [ 11 ] The cold abscess was punctured several times. Large quantities of pus were evacuated by aspiration. The abscess grew smaller and the distended stomach decreased in that the pus-formation grew continuously less and finally disappeared. While it was still flowing we were surprised one day by a renewed rise in temperature. This was not inexplicable to us, since, with the above-described constitution of the astral body, small psychological excitements could give rise to such fever. However, one must differentiate between the explanation of fever in such cases and its strongly harmful effect. For under these conditions, such a fever is the mediator for a profound intervention of the processes of destruction in the organism. One must provide at once for a strengthening of the etheric body, which will then paralyse the harmful effects of the astral. We gave high potency silver injections and the fever sank. The patient left the clinic with a twenty pounds' increase in weight, and in a stronger condition. We are under no illusion as to the necessity for further treatment to consolidate the cure. Interpolation[ 12 ] With the cases hitherto described, we wished to characterize the principles whereby we seek to find the therapeutic substances out of the diagnosis. For the sake of clear illustration we selected cases where it was necessary to proceed along very individual lines. But we have also prepared typical therapeutic substances applicable to typical diseases. We will now deal with a few cases where such typical medicaments were used. Sixth Case. Treatment of Hay Fever.[ 13 ] We had a patient with severe symptoms of hay fever. He had suffered with it from childhood. He came to us for treatment in his fortieth year. For this disorder we have our preparation “Gencydo”. This we used in this case at the time—the month of May—when the disease was at its worst. We treated him with injections and locally by painting the inside of the nose with “Gencydo” fluid. Following this there was a marked improvement, at a time of the year when formerly the patient had suffered severely from hay fever, undertaking a journey, he reported feeling incomparably better than in former years. In the hay fever season of the next year, he was travelling again from America to Europe and only had a far milder attack than previously. The repetition of the treatment achieved a tolerable condition for this year. For a thorough cure, treatment was repeated the next year, although he had no actual attack. In the fourth year the patient himself described his condition in the following words: “In the spring of 1923, I again began the treatment, as I was expecting fresh attacks. I found my nasal mucous membranes far less sensitive than before. I had to spend my time working among flowering grasses and pollen-producing trees. I also had to ride all through the summer along hot and dusty roads. Yet with the exception of a single day, no symptoms of hay fever occurred the whole summer, and I have every reason to believe that on that single day it was an ordinary cold, not an attack of hay fever. In thirty-five years this was the first time that I could stay and work unhindered in an environment where in former years I experienced real hell.” Seventh Case. Treatment of Sclerosis.[ 14 ] A woman patient, sixty-one years old, came to our clinic with sclerosis and albuminuria. Her immediate condition was the sequel of an attack of influenza, with slight fever and disturbances of the stomach and intestines. She had not felt well again since the influenza. She complained of difficult breathing on waking, attacks of vertigo, and a pounding sensation in the head, ears and hands, which was especially troublesome on waking, but occurred also when she walked or climbed uphill. Her sleep was good. There was a tendency to constipation. The urine contained protein. Her blood pressure was 185mm Hg. We took our start from the sclerosis which was noticeable in the over-activity of the astral body. The physical and etheric bodies were unable to receive the full activity of the astral. In such a case, excess activity of the astral body remains, which the physical and etheric do not re-absorb. The normal and firm poise of the human organization is only possible when this re-absorption is complete. Otherwise, as in this case, the non-absorbed part will make itself felt in attacks of vertigo and subjective sensory illusions, pounding etc. Also the non-absorbed part takes hold of the digested substances, forcing certain processes upon them before they have penetrated into the normal metabolism. This became apparent in the tendency to constipation, in the excretion of albumen, also in the stomach and intestinal disorders. The blood pressure is raised in such a case because the excess activity of the astral body also heightens the activity of the ego, and this reveals itself in raised blood pressure.—We treated the case mainly with our remedy, “Scleron”; we supplemented this with very minute doses of belladonna, only as an aid to counteract immediately the attacks of vertigo. We gave elder-flower tea to help the digestion, regulated the action of the bowels by enemas and laxative tea, and ordered a salt free diet, because salts tend to aggravate sclerosis. A comparatively quick improvement was the result. The attacks of vertigo receded, likewise the pounding. The blood pressure went down to 112mm Hg. The patient's subjective feeling visibly improved. During the subsequent year the sclerosis made no further progress. At the end of a year the patient came to us again with the same symptoms in a lesser degree. A similar treatment brought about a further improvement; now, after a lapse of considerable time since the treatment it is evident that the sclerosis is producing no further degeneration of the organism. The external symptoms characteristic of sclerosis are on the decline, and the accompanying rapid aging of the patient is no longer there. Eighth Case. Treatment of a Goitre.[ 15 ] A woman patient, who came to us in the thirty-fourth year of her life. She is typical of an individual whose psychic state is strongly influenced by a certain heaviness and fragility of the physical body. Every word she utters seems to cost her an effort. Very characteristic is the concavity in the whole shape of her face; the root of the nose is as if it were held back within the organism. She tells us that she was delicate and sickly even as a schoolgirl. The only actual disease that she went through was a slight attack of measles. She was always pale and very tired and had a poor appetite. She was sent from one doctor to another, and the following were diagnosed in succession: Infection of the apex of the lung, gastritis, anaemia. In her own mind the patient felt that she was not so much physically ill, but rather psychologically. [ 16 ] Having given this part of her history, we will now indicate the spiritual-scientific diagnosis, in order to examine everything further against the latter. [ 17 ] The patient reveals a highly atonic condition of the astral body. The ego-organization is thus held back, as it were, from the physical and etheric bodies. The whole life of consciousness is permeated by a subtle, dull drowsiness. The physical body is exposed to the processes arising from the ingested substances. Therefore, these substances are transformed into parts of the human organization. The etheric body in its coherent vitality is too strongly muted by the ego and the astral body; hence the inner sensations, namely, the sense of well-being and the sense of the orthostasis of the body become far too vivid, and the activity of the external senses is too dull. All the bodily functions thus have to take a course whereby they come into disharmony with one another. Inevitably the feeling arises in the patient that she cannot hold the functions of her body together with her own ego. This appears to her as a powerlessness of the soul. Hence she says she is more psychologically than physically ill. If the powerlessness of the ego and astral body increases, disease conditions must arise in various parts of the body, as is also indicated by the different diagnoses. Powerlessness of the ego expresses itself in irregularities of glands, such as the thyroid and the suprarenal; also in disorders of the stomach and intestinal system. All this is to be expected in the patient and does in fact occur. Her goitre and the condition of her stomach and intestinal system correspond entirely with the spiritual-scientific diagnosis. Most characteristic is the following: owing to the powerlessness of the ego and the astral body the need for sleep is partly satisfied during waking life, the patient's sleep is therefore lighter than a normal person's. To her, this appears as a persistent insomnia. In connection with this, she has a sense of easily falling asleep and easily awakening. Also in this connection she thinks she has many dreams, they are not, however, real dreams but mixtures of dreams and waking impressions. Thus they do not remain in her memory and are not powerfully exciting, for her excitability is lowered. In the inner organs the powerlessness of the ego first expresses itself in the lungs. Infection of the apex of the lung is in reality always a manifestation of a weak ego organization. The metabolism not being fully taken care of by the ego leads to rheumatism. Subjectively these things come to expression in the patient's general fatigue. Menstruation began at the age of fourteen; the weak ego organization cannot supply a sufficient unfolding of its forces to repress and restrain the menstrual process once it has come into flow. The work of the ego in this act of restraint comes as a sensation into consciousness through those nerves that enter the spinal cord in the region of the sacrum. Nerves insufficiently permeated by the currents of the ego-organization and the astral body are painful. Thus the patient complains of lower back pain during menstruation. All this led us in the following way to treatment. We have discovered that Colchicum autumnale has a powerfully stimulating action on the astral body, notably on the part that corresponds to the organization of the neck and head. Hence, we apply Colchicum autumnale to all those diseases which have their most important symptom in goitre. Accordingly, we gave the patient five drops of our Colchicum preparation three times a day; the goitre swelling receded and the patient felt much relieved. When the astral body is thus strengthened, it mediates a better functioning of the ego-organism, so that remedies which can work upon the organs of digestion and reproduction keep their strength in the organism. As such a remedy we used wormwood enemas, mixing them with oil, since oil stimulates the digestive tract. With this remedy we attained a considerable improvement. We hold that this treatment can develop its particularly favourable influence about the thirty-fifth year of life, for at this age the ego-organization has a strong affinity to the rest of the organism and can be readily stimulated, even when weak. The patient was thirty-four years old when she came to us. Ninth Case. Migrainous Conditions in the Menopause.[ 18 ] This patient came to us at the age of fifty-five. She informed us that she had been weak and delicate as a child; during childhood she had measles, scarlet fever, chicken pox, whooping cough and mumps. Menstruation began at the age of fourteen to fifteen. The bleeding was unusually intense and painful from the outset. In the fortieth year she underwent an oopherohysterectomy because of a tumour in the lower abdomen. She also reported that she suffered since the age of thirty-five from a migrainous headache lasting three days, every three or four weeks, which in her forty-sixth year developed into a cerebral illness lasting three days with unconsciousness. The spiritual-scientific diagnosis of her current condition is as follows: General weakness of the ego organization, which expresses itself in that the activity of the etheric body is insufficiently immobilized by the ego organization. Hence the vegetative organic activity extends over the head and nerve-sense system to a far greater degree than is the case when the ego-organization is normal. This diagnosis is corroborated by certain symptoms. Firstly a frequent urgency of micturition. This is due to the fact that the normally developed astral body which regulates the secretion of the kidneys is unopposed by a normally restraining ego-organization of sufficient strength. A second symptom is the long time she took to fall asleep and her tiredness on awakening. The astral body has difficulty in leaving the physical and etheric, for the ego is not strong enough in drawing it away. And when she has awakened, the vital activity, working on after sleep, was perceived as a feeling of fatigue owing to the weakness of the ego. A third symptom is to be found in the scarcity of her dreams. The pictures which the ego-organization can impress upon the astral body are feeble and cannot express themselves as vivid dreams. [ 19 ] These perceptions led to the following treatment: we had to pave the way for the ego-organization to the physical and etheric bodies. We did this by compresses with a two per cent Oxalis solution on the forehead in the evening, compresses with a seven per cent solution of Urtica dioica on the lower abdomen in the morning, and compresses with a twenty per cent solution of lime blossom on the feet at midday. The object was, in the first place, to tone down the vital activity during the night; this was brought about by the oxalic salt, which exercises within the organism the function of suppressing an excessive vital activity. In the morning we had to ensure that the ego-organization could find its way into the physical body. This was done by stimulating the circulation. The iron effect of the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) was applied for this purpose. Finally, it was desirable to assist the penetration of the physical body by the ego-organization in the course of the day. This was done by the downward drawing action of the lime blossom compresses at midday. We have already referred to the headaches to which the patient had become subject, with their intensification at the forty-sixth year of life. For us there was connection between the headaches and the cessation of the menses after the operation and their intensification with unconsciousness as a compensatory symptom for the menopause. We first tried to effect an improvement by the use of antimony. This should have worked if we had been concerned with the general metabolism, regulated by the organization of the ego. There was, however, no improvement. This proved to us that we were dealing with the relatively independent part of the ego-organization which primarily regulates the organs of reproduction. For the treatment of this, we see a specific remedy of the root of Potentilla tormentilla at a very high dilution, and in fact this worked. |
59. Spiritual Science and Speech
20 Jan 1910, Berlin Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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Closer examination would show that it contains far more than the mere portion which has been elaborated by the Ego into the consciousness soul, and which may be called the physical vehicle of the consciousness soul. Again, the etheric body is much more complicated than the vehicle of the intellectual or mind soul, and the astral body more complicated than the vehicle of the sentient soul. |
Nobody will doubt, even if he only observes human life superficially, that as man works from his Ego in the consciousness soul, intellectual soul and sentient soul, he is also transforming and changing the physical body. |
When the child expresses itself thus, its mother comes to it and the child notices that an outer occurrence corresponds to the expression of joy poured into the sound “Mamma.” |
59. Spiritual Science and Speech
20 Jan 1910, Berlin Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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It is fascinating to study from the point of view of Spiritual Science the different ways in which the being of man expresses itself,—that is to say Spiritual Science in our sense of the term. We can obtain a general survey of human life in its different phases and aspects by studying them as we have done in the course of these lectures. To-day we shall consider the expression of the spirit of man in speech, and in the next lecture, under the title of ‘Laughter and Weeping,’ an aspect of man’s power of expression which is indeed bound up with speech and yet fundamentally different from it. The whole being of man, his whole significance and dignity, is bound up with speech. Our innermost life, all our feelings and will-impulses flow out from us, linking us to our fellow-men through speech which enables us to expand and radiate into our environment. On the other hand, those who dare to penetrate into the inner life of some great individuality may feel that human speech is a kind of tyrant that exercises its power over the inner life. We are indeed aware, if we are only willing to admit it, that word and speech can only inadequately express the feelings, the thoughts, and all the intimate and individual colouring of everything that passes through the soul. We also realise that our own native language compels us to a definite kind of thinking. Do we not all realise how dependent our thinking is upon our speech? In more senses than one our concepts attach themselves to words, and an imperfectly developed man may easily mistake the word, or what the word infuses into him, for the concept. This is why so many people are incapable of building up a conceptual world of their own transcending what is imparted by the words current around them. We must surely realise that the character of a whole people speaking a common language is in a certain sense dependent on that language. Anyone who studies the more intimate connections between the characteristics of race and speech knows to what an extent the way a man is able to express the content of his soul in sound reacts upon the strength and weakness of his character, upon his temperament, indeed upon his whole outlook on life. Those who have knowledge will be able to learn a great deal about the character of a people from the configuration of their particular speech or language. Since, however, a language is common to a whole people, the individual is dependent on the community and on its average level. The individual is subject, as it were, to the tyranny and power of the community. But when we realise how our individual spiritual life on the one hand, and the common spiritual life on the other, are expressed in speech, the so-called ‘Mystery of Speech’ assumes great significance. It is certainly possible to understand something of the life of the soul by observing how a man expresses himself in words. The mystery of speech and its origin and development through the different epochs has always been a problem in certain domains of Science, but it cannot be said that specialists in our age have been very successful in fathoming this mystery. To-day, therefore, we shall try in a somewhat aphoristic manner, to throw light on the development of speech and its connection with the human being, from the point of view of Spiritual Science. What at first seems so mysterious when we designate an object or a process by a word, is how the particular sound-combination in the word or sentence is related to what comes forth from us, and how it expresses the phenomenon as a word. External Science has made many attempts to bring the most varied experiences together in different combinations, but this mode of observation has been felt to be unsatisfactory. There is one question which is really so simple, and yet so difficult to answer: how was it that man, confronted with something in the external world, produced, as from out of himself, an echo of the particular object or process in a definite sound? Some people thought this question quite simple. They imagined, for instance, that speech-formation took its start from the fact that man heard some external sound, either produced by animals, or caused by the impact of one object against another, and that he then imitated the sound through the inner faculty of speech, like a child, who, hearing the ‘bow-wow’ of a dog, imitates this sound and calls the dog ‘bow-wow.’ Word-formation of this kind may be called ‘onomatopoeia,’ an imitation of the sound. This kind of imitation was the basis of the original sound and word formation,—at least so it was stated by those who regarded the matter from this particular point of view. The question is of course still unanswered as to how man comes to give names to dumb entities from which no sound proceeds. How does he ascend from the sound uttered by an animal or caused by an occurrence which can be heard, to one which cannot? Max Müller, the famous Philologist, ridiculed this, calling it the ‘bow-wow’ theory, because he realised what an unsatisfactory piece of speculation it was. He advanced another theory in its place which his opponents in turn called ‘mystical,’ though they used the word in an unjustifiable sense. Max Müller really means that every single thing contains something of the nature of sound within itself; everything has sound in a certain sense, not only a glass we let fall, or a bell we strike, but every single thing. Man’s capacity to set up a relationship between his soul and the inner sound-essence of the object calls forth in the soul the power to express this inner sound-essence; the inner essence of the bell is expressed in some way when we ‘feel again’ its tone in the ‘ding-dong.’ Max Müller's opponents ridiculed him in return by calling his the ‘ding-dong’ theory. However many more combinations of this kind we might care to enumerate,—and they have been evolved with great diligence,—we should find that the attempts to characterise in this external way what man causes to resound like an echo from his soul to meet the essence of things, must always be unsatisfactory. We must, in effect, penetrate more deeply into the whole inner being of man. According to Spiritual Science man is a highly complex being. As he stands before us he has in the first place his physical body, which contains substances which are also found in the mineral world. As a second, higher member he has the etheric, or life body. Then he has the member which is the vehicle of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, instinct, desire and passion,—the astral body. This astral body is, to Spiritual Science, as real a part of man's constitution as anything the eyes can see and the hands touch. The fourth member of the human being has been spoken of as the bearer of the Ego, and man's evolution, at its present stage, consists in working, from his Ego outwards, as it were, at the transformation of the other three members of his being. It has also been indicated that in a far-off future the human Ego will have transformed these three members to such an extent that nothing will remain of what Nature, or the spiritual powers existing in Nature, have made of them. The astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, of all ebbing and flowing ideas, feelings and perceptions, came into existence in the first place without our co-operation,—that is to say, without the activity of our Ego. The Ego works upon the astral body, purifying and refining it, gaining mastery over its qualities and activities. If the Ego has worked but little on the astral body, man is the slave of his instincts and desires. If, however, the Ego has refined the instincts and desires into virtues, has co-ordinated phantasmal thinking by the guiding threads of logic, a portion of the astral body is transformed. Whereas formerly it was not worked upon by the Ego, it has become a product of the Ego. When the Ego carries out this work consciously,—as it is beginning to do in human evolution to-day,—we call the part of the astral body which has been consciously transformed from out of the Ego, ‘Spirit Self,’ or ‘Manas,’ to use a term of Oriental Philosophy. When the Ego works in a different and more intense way, not only upon the astral body, but also upon the etheric body, we call the part of the etheric body which has been thus transmuted the ‘Life Spirit’ or ‘Budhi’ in Eastern terminology. And finally, although this belongs to the far-off future, when the Ego has become so strong that it transmutes the physical body and regulates its laws,—in such a way that the Ego is everywhere controlling all that lives in the physical body,—we give the name of ‘Spirit Man’ to that part of the physical body thus under the rulership of the Ego; and since this work begins with a regulation of the breathing process, the oriental term is ‘Atman,’ from which the German ‘atmen’ (to breathe) is derived. In the first place, then, we have man as a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And just as we may speak of three of the members of our being as being products of the past, so may we speak of three other members which as a result of the work of the Ego will gradually unfold in the future. Thus we speak of a sevenfold nature of the human being, adding Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man to physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. But although we regard these three higher principles as belonging to a far-off future of human evolution, it must be said that in a certain sense man is preparing for them even to-day. Man will only begin consciously to transform the physical, etheric and astral bodies by means of the Ego in a distant future, but unconsciously, that is to say, without full consciousness, the dim activity of the Ego has already transformed these three members. A certain result has indeed already been achieved. Those inner members of man's being mentioned in previous lectures could only have come into existence because the work of the Ego upon the astral body has resulted in the development of the sentient soul as a kind of inner reflection of the sentient body. The sentient body conveys what we call ‘enjoyment’ (Genuss) and this is reflected in the inner soul-being as the desires we ascribe to the soul. (Sentient body and astral body are the same thing so far as man is concerned; without the sentient body there could be no ‘enjoyment.’) Thus astral body, and transformed astral body, or sentient soul, belong together in the same sense as enjoyment and desires. The Ego has also worked on the etheric body in the past. What it has unfolded there has brought about the fact that in his inner being man bears the intellectual, or mind-soul. The intellectual soul, which is also the bearer of the memory, is connected with a subconscious process of transformation of the etheric body proceeding from the Ego. And finally, the Ego has in past ages already worked at the transformation of the physical body in order that man may exist in his present form. The product of this is called the consciousness soul, through which man acquires knowledge of the things of the outer world. In this sense too, therefore, we may speak of the sevenfold human being: the three soul members, sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul have arisen as the result of a preparatory, subconscious. Ego activity. But here the Ego has worked unconsciously or subconsciously, upon its sheaths. Now we must ask: are not these three members, physical body, etheric body and astral body complicated entities? It is a most marvellous structure, this physical body of man! Closer examination would show that it contains far more than the mere portion which has been elaborated by the Ego into the consciousness soul, and which may be called the physical vehicle of the consciousness soul. Again, the etheric body is much more complicated than the vehicle of the intellectual or mind soul, and the astral body more complicated than the vehicle of the sentient soul. These elements are poor in comparison with what was already in existence before man possessed an Ego. Therefore Spiritual Science teaches us that in a primordial past the first germ of man's physical body was brought into existence by Spiritual Beings. To this was added the etheric body, then the astral body, and finally the Ego. The physical body of man has thus passed through four evolutionary stages. First of all the physical body existed in direct correspondence with the spiritual world, then it was elaborated, permeated and interwoven with the etheric body, and grew more complicated. Then it was permeated by the astral body and grew more complicated still. Then the Ego was added, and only when the Ego had worked on the physical body was a portion transformed into the vehicle of so-called ‘human consciousness,’ the faculty by which man acquires a knowledge of the external world. But this physical body has to do a great deal more than create a knowledge of the external world through the senses and brain. It has to carry out a number of activities lying at the basis of consciousness but taking their course entirely outside the region of the brain. And so it is with the etheric and astral bodies. When we realise that all around us in the external world is Spirit, that Spirit is at the basis of everything material, etheric, astral, we must say: just as the Ego itself, as a spiritual being works from within outwards while man's evolution proceeds in the three members of his being, so must Spiritual Beings, or spiritual activities, if you will, have worked upon his physical, etheric and astral bodies before the Ego asserted itself and elaborated a further fragment of what had already been prepared. Here we look back to past ages when an activity proceeding from without inwards was exercised upon the astral, etheric and physical bodies, just as now the Ego works from within outwards upon these three members. Thus it must be said that spiritual creation, spiritual activity has been at work on our sheaths, imparting form, movement, shape and so on before the Ego was able to take root therein. We must speak of the existence of spiritual activities in human beings preceding the activity of the Ego. We bear within us spiritual activities which are necessary preliminaries to those of the Ego and which were in operation before the Ego could intervene. Let us then for the moment eliminate all that has been elaborated by the Ego from the three members of our being (sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul) and consider the structure, inner movement and activity of the sheaths of the human being. Before the activity of the Ego, a spiritual activity was exercised upon us. Therefore in Spiritual Science we say that in man as he is to-day we have to do with an individual soul, with a soul permeated by an Ego which makes each single human being into an individuality complete in itself. We say that before man became this complete Ego-being, he was the product of a ‘Group-Soul,’ of a soul essence, just as we speak of Group-Souls to-day in the animal world. The individual soul in the human being is, in the animal kingdom, at the basis of a whole family or species. A whole animal species has one common animal Group-Soul. In man, the Soul is individualised. Thus before man became an individual soul, another soul worked in the three members of his being. This other soul—which we can only learn to know to-day through Spiritual Science—is the predecessor of our own Ego. This predecessor of the Ego, man's Group- or Species-Soul which gave over to the Ego the three members it had already elaborated, physical body, etheric body, astral body, in order that the Ego might further work upon them,—this Group-Soul similarly transformed, developed and regulated the three bodies from its inner centre. And the last activity which worked upon the human being before the bestowal of the Ego, the last influences immediately preceding the birth of the Ego, are to-day expressed in human speech. If, therefore, we take our start from our life of consciousness, intelligence and feeling, and look back to what has preceded this inner life, we are led to a soul activity as yet unpermeated by the Ego, the result of which is to-day expressed in speech. Now let us consider this fourfold being of ours, and what lies at its foundation. How is it expressed outwardly in the physical body? The physical body of a plant has a different appearance from that of a man. Why is this so? It is because the plant possesses only physical body and etheric body, whereas in the physical body of man astral body and Ego are working as well. And what is inwardly working there correspondingly forms and transforms the physical. What is it, then, that has worked in man's physical body in such a way that it has become permeated by an etheric or life body? The system of veins and glands is, in the human being and also in the animal, the outer physical expression of the etheric or life body; that is to say, the etheric body is the architect or moulder of the system of veins and glands. The astral body, again, moulds the nervous system. Therefore it is only correct to speak of a nervous system in the case of beings possessing an astral body. And what is the expression of the Ego in man? It is the blood system, and, in the human being, the blood which is under the influence of the inner, vital warmth. Everything that the Ego brings about in man, if it is to be moulded into the physical body, proceeds by way of the blood. Therefore it is that blood is such ‘a very peculiar fluid.’ When the Ego has elaborated the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, all that it is able to shape and fashion can only penetrate to the physical body by way of the blood. The blood is the medium for all the activities of astral body and Ego. Nobody will doubt, even if he only observes human life superficially, that as man works from his Ego in the consciousness soul, intellectual soul and sentient soul, he is also transforming and changing the physical body. The facial expression is surely an elaboration of what is working and living in the inner being. And is there anyone who would not admit that the inner activity of thought, if it lays hold of the whole soul, has a transforming effect on the brain, throughout the course of human life? Our brain adapts itself to our thinking; it is an instrument that moulds itself according to the requirements of our thinking. But, if we observe to what extent man is to-day able to mould his external being artistically from out of his Ego, we shall see that it is indeed very little. We can accomplish very little through the blood by setting it in movement from the “inner warmth.” The Spiritual Beings, whose activity preceded the activity of the Ego could do much more. They had a more effective medium at their disposal, and under their influence, man's form was so moulded that it has become, on the whole, an expression of what these Spiritual Beings made of him. What was the medium in which they worked? It was the air. Just as we work in the inner warmth, making our blood pulsate and thus bringing it to activity within our own form,—so did these Spiritual Beings work with regard to the air. Our true human form is the result of the work of these Beings upon us through the medium of the air. It may appear strange to say that spiritual activities worked upon man through the air in a far-off past. I have already said that we should not understand our own inner life of soul and spirit if we were to conceive of it merely as so many concepts and ideas, if we did not know that it has been bestowed by the whole external world. Anyone who stated that concepts and ideas arise within man, even though there may be no ideas in the external world, might just as well say that he can obtain water from an empty glass. Our concepts would be so much froth if they were anything else than what is living in the objects outside us and the laws within them. The elements brought to life in the soul are drawn from the world around us. We may say, therefore, that everything around us in the material world is permeated and woven through by Spiritual Beings. However strange it may appear, the air around us is not merely the substance revealed by Chemistry; spiritual beings, spiritual activities are working within it. Through the blood warmth proceeding from the Ego (for that is the essential point), we can to a very small extent mould our physical body. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego performed mighty things in the outer form of our physical body through the medium of the air. That is the important thing. It is the form of the larynx, and all that is connected with it, that makes us man. This marvellous organ and its relation to the other instruments of speech has been elaborated artistically out of the spiritual element of the air. Goethe said so beautifully in speaking of the eye: “The eye has formed itself from the light, for the light.” To say in the sense of Schopenhauer that “without an eye sensitive to the light, the impression of the light would not exist for us,” is only half a truth. The other half is that we should have no eyes if the light, in a primordial past, had not plastically elaborated the eye from undifferentiated organs. In the light, therefore, we must not merely see the abstract essence described to-day by Physical Science as light; we have to seek in the light the hidden essence that is able to create an eye. In another sphere, it is the same thing as if we were to say that the air is permeated and ensouled by a Being who at a certain epoch was able to mould in man the highly artistic organ of the larynx and all that is related to it. All the rest of the human form,—down to the smallest details,—has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. Hence, it is speech that raises man above the animal. The Spiritual Being whom we call the “Spirit of the Air,” has indeed worked in and moulded the animal nature, but the activity did not reach the point of development of a speech organism such as is possessed by man. With the exception, for example, of what has been elaborated unconsciously by the Ego in the brain and in the perfecting of the senses,—everything, that is, except the products of Ego activity,—has proceeded from a higher activity preceding that of the human Ego, whose purpose it was to create man's body out of a further elaboration of his organs of speech. There is no time now to explain why the birds, for instance, in spite of their perfection of song, have remained at a stage where their form cannot, be an expression of the organs of speech. So far, then, as the instruments of speech are concerned, man was already inwardly organised before he arrived at the stage of thinking, feeling and willing as he does to-day. These latter processes are connected with the Ego. We can now understand that the higher Spiritual activities, having created the astral, etheric and physical bodies through the influences of the air, could only so mould the physical body that it ultimately became a kind of appendage of man's instruments of speech. When man had been thus presented with an organ responding to the so-called “Spirit of the Air” (in the same sense as the eye responds to the spiritual essence of the light), his Ego could project into this organ its own functions of intelligence, consciousness and feeling. A threefold subconscious activity,—an activity in the physical, etheric and astral bodies precedes the activity of the Ego. A keystone for the understanding of this is our knowledge that it was due to the “Group-soul,” which has, of course, worked upon the animal also, but imperfectly. This must be taken into consideration in our study of the spiritual activity in the astral body preceding that of the Ego. In such a study, we must eliminate any conception of the Ego itself, but bear in mind all that has been brought about by the Group-Ego from mysterious depths of being. Desire and enjoyment, in an imperfect, chaotic condition, confront each other in the astral body. Desire could become a soul-quality, could be transformed into an inner faculty, because it already had a precursor in the astral body of man. Similarly, the capacity for the formation of pictures, a symbol-creating faculty, inheres, in the etheric body, confronting outer stimuli. A distinction must be made between this pre-Ego activity of the etheric body and the Ego activity itself. When the Ego is functioning as intellectual soul, it seeks, at the present stage of human development, to present as Truth what is the most faithful image of external objects. Anything that does not correspond to outer objects is said to be ‘untrue.’ The spiritual activities preceding the operations of the Ego did not function in this way; they were more symbolical, picture-like, more or less like a dream. We may dream, for instance, that a shot is fired, and on waking find that a chair beside the bed has fallen down. The outer event and impression (the falling chair) are transformed in the dream into a sense image, the shot. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego “symbolised,” and this is what we ourselves do when we rise to higher spiritual activity through Initiation. At that stage, we try, but with full consciousness, to work our way from the merely abstract outer world into a symbolising, imaginative activity. These spiritual beings worked yet further on the human physical body, making man into an expression of the correspondence between outer happenings or facts, and imitation. In the child, for instance, we find imitation when the other members of the soul are as yet but little developed. Imitation is a process belonging to the subconscious essence of man's nature. Therefore, early education should be based on imitation, for it exists as a natural impulse in the human being before the Ego begins to regulate the inner activities of soul. The impulse to imitate in presence of outer activities, in the physical body, the symbolising process in the etheric body in response to outer stimuli, and the so-called correspondence between desire and enjoyment in the astral body,—all these things must be thought of as elaborated through the agency of the air. Their plastic, artistic impression has been worked into the larynx and the whole apparatus of speech. The Beings who preceded the Ego, then, formed and moulded man in this threefold sense, and thus the air can come to expression in the human being. When we study the faculty of speech in the true sense we must ask: is speech the “tone” that we produce? No, it is not. Our Ego sets in movement, and gives form to what has been moulded and incorporated in us through the air. Just as we set the eye in movement in order to receive the light that is working externally (the eye itself is there for the reception of light), so, within ourselves, from out of the Ego, those organs which have been elaborated from the spiritual essence of the air are set in movement; and then we must wait until the spirit of the air itself sounds back to us as the echo of our own “air activity,”—the tone. We do not produce the tone any more than the single parts of a flute produce the tone. We produce from our own being, the activity which the Ego is able to develop by using the organs which have been elaborated from out the spirit of the air. Then it must be left to the spirit of the air to set the air in movement again, by means of the same activity which has produced the organs. Thus the word sounds forth. Human speech is founded on the threefold correspondence, of which I have spoken. But what is it that must correspond? Upon what has imitation to be based in the physical body? Imitation in the physical body must be based upon the fact that, in the movements of our vocal organs, we imitate the outer activities and objects which we perceive and which make an impression upon us; that we produce the echo of what we have in the first place heard echoing as tone, imitating through the physical body the thing that has made an external impression upon us. The painter imitates a scene which is made up of quite other elements than colour and canvas, light and shade. Just as the painter imitates by manipulating light and shade, so do we imitate what comes to us from outside, by setting our organs in movement, imitatively,—organs which have been elaborated out of the element of the air. What we bring forth in the sound, is therefore an actual imitation of the essential being of things. Our consonants and vowels are nothing but reflections and imitations of impressions from outside. In the etheric body, we have a picture-forming, symbolising activity. Hence we can understand that although the earliest beginnings of our speech arose through imitation, a development took place in that the process tore itself loose, as it were, from the external impressions, and was then further elaborated. In symbolism,—as in the dream,—the etheric body elaborates something that no longer resembles the outer impressions, and the continued operation of the sound, consists in this. First of all, the etheric body works upon something that is mere imitation; this mere imitation is transformed by it, and becomes an independent process. So that what we have inwardly elaborated, corresponds only in a symbolical sense, as sense-imagery, to the outer impressions. Our activity is no longer merely imitative. Finally, there is a third element,—desire, emotion, everything that lives inwardly. This expresses itself in the astral body, and works in such a way, that it gives further form to the tone. These inner experiences stream from within outwards into the tone. Sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, desire, wish,—all these things flow into it, and impart to it a subjective element. First there is the process of mere imitation. This is further developed as speech symbolism in the tone- or word-picture that has become an independent entity, and this is now again transformed by being permeated with man's inner experiences of sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, horror, fright and so forth. It must always be an outer correspondence that first wrests itself from the soul, in the tone. But when the soul expresses its experiences, and allows them to sound forth, as it were, it has first to seek for the corresponding outer experience. The third element, then, where pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, horror and so on, express themselves inwardly, psychically, in the tone, has first to seek for its correspondence. In imitation there is an after-copy of the external impression; the inner tone-picture, the symbol that has arisen, is the next development; but what man allows to sound forth, merely from inner joy, pain, and so on, would only be a radiation or emanation to which nothing could correspond. When children learn to speak, we can continually observe the correspondence between outer being and inner experience. The child begins to translate something it feels into sound. When it cries “Mamma,” “Papa,” this is nothing but an inner transfusion of emotion into sound, the externalisation of an inward element. When the child expresses itself thus, its mother comes to it and the child notices that an outer occurrence corresponds to the expression of joy poured into the sound “Mamma.” Naturally, the child does not ask how it happens that in this case its mother comes to it. The inner experience of joy, or pain, associates itself with the outer impression. This is the third way in which speech operates. It may therefore be said that speech has arisen just as much from without, inwards, through imitation, as through the association of external reality with the expression of the inner being. What has led to the formation of the words “Mamma,” “Papa,” from the expression of the inner being, which feels satisfaction when the mother comes, occurs in innumerable cases. Wherever the human being perceives that something happens as the result of an inner utterance, the expression of the inner being unites itself with the external fact. All this takes place without the co-operation of the Ego. The Ego only later takes over this activity. Thus we can see how an activity, preceding that of the Ego, worked at the configuration which lies at the basis of man's faculty of expression in speech. And because the Ego makes its entrance after the foundations for speech have already been created, speech, in turn, accommodates itself to the nature of the Ego. As a result, utterances corresponding to the sentient body are permeated with the sentient soul; the pictures and symbols corresponding to the etheric body are permeated with the intellectual soul. Man pours into the sound what he experiences in the intellectual soul, and this was at first, mere imitation. Thus, do those elements of our speech, which are reproductions of inner experiences of the soul, come gradually into existence. In order, therefore, to understand the essential nature of speech, we must realise that there lives within us, something that was active before the Ego, and any of its activities were there; into this, the Ego afterwards poured what it is able to elaborate. We must not demand that speech shall exactly correspond to what originates in the Ego, to all the spirituality and intimacies of our individual being. Speech can never be the direct expression of the Ego. The activity of the spirit of speech, is of a symbolical nature in the etheric body, imitative in the physical body. All this in conjunction with what is elaborated by the spirit of speech, from out the sentient soul,—for it projects the inner experiences from that domain, in such a way that we have in the sound an emanation of the inner life,—justifies us in saying that speech has not been elaborated by the methods of the conscious Ego, as we know it to-day. The development of speech, is indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present, any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech only reproduces the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit, in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active. This is a somewhat figurative way of speaking, but it expresses the truth. It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being, as a work of art. By analogy, speech must be conceived of as a work of art, but we must not forget, that each work of art can only be understood within the scope of that particular art. Speech itself, therefore, must necessarily impose certain limits upon us. If this were taken into consideration, a pedantic effort, like Fritz Mauthner's ‘Critique of Speech,’ would have been impossible from the very outset. In that work, the critique of speech is built upon entirely false premises. When we examine human languages, says Mauthner, we find that they by no means, correctly reproduce the objective reality of things. Yes, but are they intended to do so? Is there any possibility of their doing so? No; no more than it is possible for the picture to reproduce external reality by the colours, lights and shades, on the canvas. The spirit of speech underlying this activity of man, must be conceived in an artistic sense. It has only been possible to speak of these things in bare outline. But when we know that an Artist, who moulds speech, is at work in humanity, we shall understand that however different the single languages may be, artistic power has been at work in them all. When this ‘spirit of speech,’ as we will now call the being working through the air, has manifested at a comparatively low stage in man, its action has been like that of the atomistic spirit, which would build up everything out of the single particles. It is then possible to build up a language where a whole sentence is composed of single sound-pictures. When in the Chinese language, for instance, we find the sounds ‘Shi’ and ‘King,’ we have two ‘atoms’ of speech formation, the one syllable ‘Shi,’ or song, and ‘King,’ book. Putting the two sound-pictures together—‘Shi-King,’ we should have the German ‘Liederbuch’ (English, Song-Book). This ‘atomising’ process results in something that is conceived of as one whole, ‘Song-Book.’ That is a small example of how the Chinese language gives form to concepts and ideas. If we elaborate what has been said to-day, we can understand how to study the spirit of so marvelously constructed a language as the Semitic, for instance. The foundation of the Semitic language lies in certain tone-pictures, consisting really, only of consonants. Into these tone-pictures, vowels are inserted. If, for the mere sake of example we take the consonants q—t—l, and insert an ‘ a ’ and again ‘ a ’, we obtain the word ‘qatal’ (German, töten, to kill), whereas the word consisting of consonants only is the mere imitation of an external sound impression. This is a remarkable permeation, for ‘qatal,’ to kill, has come into existence as a sound picture, through the fact that the outer happening or event has been imitated by the organs of speech; that is the original sound picture. The soul elaborates this, by adding something that can only be an inner experience. The sound picture is further developed and the killing referred to a subject. Fundamentally speaking, the whole Semitic language has been built up in this way. The working together of the different elements of speech-formation is expressed in the whole construction of the Semitic language, in the symbolising element that is pre-eminently active. The activity of the spirit of speech in the etheric body is revealed in the characteristics of the Semitic language, where all the single, imitated sound-pictures are elaborated and transformed into sense images by the insertion of vowels. All words in the Semitic language are fundamentally so formed, that they are related to the external world, as sense images. In contrast to this, the elements in the Indo-Germanic languages are stimulated more by the inner expression of the astral body, of the inner being. The astral body is already bound up with consciousness. When man confronts the outer world, he distinguishes himself from it. When he confronts the outer world, from the point of view of the etheric body, he mingles, and is one with it. Only when objects are reflected in the consciousness, does he distinguish himself from them. This activity of the astral body, with its wholly inward experience, is wonderfully expressed in the Indo-Germanic languages—in contrast to the Semitic—in that they include the verb ‘to be,’—the affirmation of what is there without our co-operation. This is possible because man distinguishes himself from what causes the outer impression. If, therefore, a Semitic language wants to express ‘God is good,’ it is not directly possible. The word ‘is’, which expresses existence, cannot be rendered, because it is derived from the antithesis of astral body, and external world. The etheric body, simply presents things. Therefore, in the Semitic language, we should have to say ‘God the Good.’ The confronting of subject and object is not expressed. In these Indo-Germanic languages there is differentiation from the outer world; they contain the element of a tapestry of perceptions spread out over the external world. These in turn, react on the human being, strengthening and giving support to the quality of ‘inwardness,’ that is to say, all that may be spoken of as the predisposition to build up strong individuality, a strong Ego. It may seem to many of you that I have only been able to give unsatisfactory indications, but it would be necessary to speak for a fortnight if a detailed exposition of speech were to be given. Only those who have heard many such lectures, and have entered into the spirit of them, will realise that a stimulus such as has been given to-day is not without justification. The only intention has been to show that it is possible to acquire a conception of speech and language in the sense of Spiritual Science, and this leads us to realise that speech can only be understood with the artistic sense which must first have been developed. All learning will be shipwrecked if it is not willing to recreate what the ‘artist of speech’ has moulded in man before the Ego was able to work within him. Only the artistic sense can understand the mysteries of speech; the artistic sense alone can recreate. Learned abstractions can never make a work of art intelligible. Only those ideas which are able fruitfully to recreate what the artist has expressed with other media,—colour, tone, and so on,—can shed light on a work of art. Artistic feeling alone can understand the artist; artists of speech alone can understand the creative Spiritual element in the origin of speech. This is one thing that Spiritual Science has to accomplish with regard to the domain of speech. The other thing has its bearing in practical life itself. When we understand how speech has proceeded from an inner, prehuman artist, we shall also realise that when we want to speak or express through speech, something that claims to be authoritative, this artistic sense must be allowed to come into play. There is not much realisation of this in our modern age, when there is so little living feeling for speech. To-day, if a man can speak at all, he imagines that he is at liberty to express everything. What should be realised is that we must recreate in the soul a direct connection between what we wish to express in speech, and how we express it. The artist of speech, ‘in all domains’ must be reawakened within us. To-day, people are satisfied with any form that is given to what they want to say. How many people realise that the artistic feeling for speech and language is necessary in every description or thesis? This, however, is absolutely essential in the domain of Spiritual Science. Examine any genuine writings in the sphere of Spiritual Science and you will find that a true Spiritual Scientist has tried to mould each sentence artistically; he does not place a verb arbitrarily at the beginning or end. You will find that every sentence is a ‘birth ‘ because it must be experienced, not merely as thought, but inwardly in the soul, as actual form. If you follow the coherence of what is written, you will find that in three consecutive sentences, the middle one is not merely an appendage of the first, and the third of the second. The third sentence is already there in germ, before the second is built up, because the force of the middle sentence must depend on what has remained of the force in the first, and this must in turn pass over to the third. In Spiritual Science, one cannot create without the artistic feeling for language. Nothing else is of any use. The essential point is to free ourselves from being slavishly chained to the words, and this cannot happen if we imagine that any word can express a thought, for our speech formation is then already at fault. Words which are coined wholly for the world of sense, can never adequately express super-sensible facts. Those who ask, ‘how can one describe the etheric or astral body concretely by a word,’ have understood nothing at all of these things. Only that man has understood who says to himself, ‘I will experience what the etheric body really is from the one aspect before I allow myself to write a single page about it, and I will realise that it is a question of artistic imagery. Then I will describe it from the other three aspects.’ In such a case, we have the matter presented from four different aspects, so that the presentations given through language are really artistic imagery. If this is not realised, we shall have nothing but abstractions and an emaciated repetition of what is already known. Hence, development in Spiritual Science will always be bound up with a development of an inner understanding of the plastic forces of speech. In this sense Spiritual Science will work fruitfully upon our present atrocious style of speech which reveals no indication of the nature of artistic power. If it were otherwise, so many people who can really hardly speak or write, would not rush into literary activity. People have long ago lost the realisation that prose writing, for instance, is a much higher activity than writing verse, only, of course, the prose that is written to-day is of a much lower order. Spiritual Science is there to impart, in every domain, the stimulus connected with the deepest spheres of human life. In this sense, Spiritual Science will fulfil the dreams of the greatest men. It will be able to conquer the super-sensible worlds through thought, and so to pour out the thoughts into sound pictures that speech can again become an instrument for communicating the vision of the soul in super-sensible worlds. Then Spiritual Science will fulfil, in ever-increasing measure, a saying relating to this important region of man's inner being: ‘Immeasurably deep is thought, and its winged instrument is the word.’ |
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture VIII
03 Oct 1920, Dornach Tr. Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber Rudolf Steiner |
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By this time a person is less intensively connected to that within than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement, and life. Something else, however, is evolving simultaneously during this emancipation of balance, movement, and life. |
It is extremely interesting to observe in detail the way in which a child gradually finds his way into life, orienting himself by means of the senses of taste, smell, and touch. |
While on the one hand we have penetrated into our inner being and have deepened our power of Imagination, on the other hand we have raised what resulted from our mental work on The Philosophy of Freedom up out of ordinary consciousness. Thoughts that formerly had floated more or less abstractly within pure thinking have been transformed into substantial forces that are alive in our consciousness: what once was pure thought is now Inspiration. |
322. The Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture VIII
03 Oct 1920, Dornach Tr. Frederick Amrine, Konrad Oberhuber Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I attempted to show the methods employed by Eastern spirituality for approaching the spiritual world and pointed out how anybody who wished to pursue this path into the super-sensible more or less dispensed with the bridge linking him with his fellow men. He chose a path different from that which establishes communication within society by means of language, thought, and perception of the ego. And I showed how it was initially attempted not to understand through the word what one's fellow man wished to say, what one wants to understand from him, but to live within the words. This process of living within the word was enhanced by forming the words into certain aphorisms. One lived in these and repeated them, so that the forces accrued in the soul by this process were strengthened further by repetition. And I showed how something was achieved in the condition of the soul that might be called a state of Inspiration, in the sense in which I have used the word, except that the sages of the ancient East were, of course, members of their race: their ego-consciousness was much less developed than in later epochs of human evolution. They thus entered into the spiritual world in a more instinctive manner, and because the whole thing was instinctive and thus resulted, in a sense, from a healthy drive within human nature, in the earliest times it could not lead to the pathological afflictions of which we have also spoken. In later times steps were taken by the so-called Mysteries to guard against the rise of such afflictions as I have described to you. I said that those Westerners who desire to gain knowledge of the spiritual world must approach this in another way. Humanity has progressed in the interim. Different soul faculties have evolved, so that one cannot simply renew the ancient Eastern path of spiritual development. Within the realm of spiritual life one cannot long to return in a reactionary manner to prehistoric or earlier historical periods of human evolution. For Western civilization, the path leading into the spiritual worlds is that of Imagination. This faculty of Imagination, however, must be integrated organically into the life of the soul as a whole. This can come about in the most varied ways, just as the Eastern path of development was not unequivocally predetermined but could take numerous different courses. Today I would like to describe the path into the spiritual world that conforms to the needs of Western civilization and is particularly suited to anyone immersed in the scientific life of the West. In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have described an entirely safe path leading to the super-sensible, but I describe it in such a way that it applies for everybody, above all for those who have not devoted their lives to science. Today I shall describe a path into the super-sensible that is much more for the scientist. All my experience has taught me that for such a scientist a kind of precondition for this cognitional striving is to take up what is presented in my book, Philosophy of Freedom. I will explain what I mean by this. This book, Philosophy of Freedom, was not written with the same intent as most books written today. Nowadays books are written simply in order to inform the reader of the book's subject matter, so that the reader learns the book's contents in accordance with his education, his scientific training, or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not my primary Intention in writing Philosophy of Freedom, and thus it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire Information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page. In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one's own efforts, from one thought to the next. The book constantly presupposes the mental collaboration of the reader. Moreover, the book presupposes that which the soul becomes in the process of such mental exertion. Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously has not read Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one's usual thinking [Vorstellen] into a thinking independent of the senses [ein sinnlichkeitsfreies Denken], in which one is fully immersed, so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book. One should be able to say to oneself: now I know, as a result of the inner thought activity I myself have expended, what pure thinking actually is. The strange thing is that most Western philosophers totally deny the reality of the very thing that my Philosophy of Freedom seeks to awaken as something real in the soul of the reader. Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical mechanics. Specialization, however, has already grown to such an extent that nowadays philosophy is often pursued by people totally lacking any knowledge of mathematical thinking. The pursuit of philosophy is actually impossible without a grasp of at least the spirit of mathematical thinking. We have seen what Goethe's attitude was toward this spirit of mathematical thinking, even though he made no claim himself to any special training in mathematics. Many thus would deny the existence of the very faculty I would like those who study The Philosophy of Freedom to acquire. And now let us imagine a reader who simply sets about working through The Philosophy of Freedom within the context of his ordinary consciousness in the way I have described: he will, of course, not be able to claim that he has been transported into a super-sensible world. For I intentionally wrote The Philosophy of Freedom in the way that I did so that it would present itself to the world initially as a purely philosophical work. Just think what a disservice would have been accorded anthroposophically oriented spiritual science if I had begun immediately with spiritual scientific writings! These writings would, of course, have been disregarded by all trained philosophers as the worst kind of dilettantism, as the efforts of an amateur. To begin with I had to write purely philosophically. I had to present the world with something thought out philosophically in the strict sense, though it transcended the normal bounds of philosophy. At some point, however, the transition had to be made from a merely philosophical and scientific kind of writing to a spiritual scientific writing. This occurred at a time when I was invited to write a special chapter about Goethe's scientific writings for a German biography of Goethe. This was at the end of the last century, in the 1890s. And so I was to write the chapter on Goethe's scientific writings: I had, in fact, finished it and sent it to the publisher when there appeared another work of mine, called Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age. The book was a bridge between pure philosophy and an anthroposophical orientation. When this work came out, my manuscript was returned to me by the publisher, who had enclosed nothing but my fee so that I would not make a fuss, for thereby the legal obligations had been met. Among the learned pedants, there was obviously no interest in anything—not even a single chapter devoted to the development of Goethe's attitude toward natural science written by one who had authored this book on mysticism. I will now assume that The Philosophy of Freedom has been worked through already with one's ordinary consciousness in the way described. Now we are in the right frame of mind for our souls to undertake in a healthy way what I described yesterday, if only very briefly, as the path leading into Imagination. It is possible to pursue this path in a way consonant with Western life if we attempt to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we allow them to work upon us without thinking about them but still perceiving them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but actually in the very process of doing so we are continually saturating our percepts with concepts; in scientific thinking we interweave percepts and concepts entirely systematically, building up systems of concepts and so on. By having acquired the capacity for the kind of thinking that gradually emerges from The Philosophy of Freedom, one can become capable of such acute inner activity that one can exclude and suppress conceptual thinking from the process of perception and surrender oneself to bare percepts. But there is something else we can do in order to strengthen the forces of the soul and absorb percepts unelaborated by concepts. One can, moreover, refrain from formulating the judgments that arise when these percepts are joined to concepts and create instead symbolic images, or images of another sort, alongside the images seen by the eye, heard by the ear, and rendered by the senses of warmth, touch, and so on. If we thus bring our activity of perception into a state of flux, infusing it with life and movement, not as we do when forming concepts but by elaborating perception symbolically or artistically, we will develop much sooner the power of allowing the percepts to permeate us as such. An excellent preparation for this kind of cognition is to school oneself rigorously in what I have characterized as phenomenalism, as elaboration of phenomena. If one has really striven not to allow inertia to carry one through the veil of sense perception upon reaching the boundary of the material world, in order to look for all kinds of metaphysical explanations in terms of atoms and molecules, but has instead used concepts to set the phenomena in order and follow them through to the archetypal phenomena, one has already undergone a training that enables one to isolate the phenomena from everything conceptual. And if one still symbolizes the phenomena, turns them into images, one acquires a potent soul forte enabling one to absorb the external world free from concepts. Obviously we cannot expect to achieve this quickly. Spiritual research demands of us far more than research in a laboratory or observatory. It demands above all an intense effort of the individual will. If one has practiced such an inner representation of symbolic images for a certain length of time and striven in addition to dwell contemplatively upon images that one keeps present in the soul in a way analogous to the mental representation of phenomena, images that otherwise only pass away when we race from sensation to sensation, from experience to experience; if one has accustomed oneself to dwell contemplatively for longer and longer periods of time upon an image that one has fully understood, that one has formed oneself or taken at somebody else's suggestion so that it cannot be a reminiscence, and if one repeats this process again and again, one strengthens one's inner soul forces and finally realizes that one experiences something of which one previously had no inkling. The only way to obtain even an approximate idea of such an experience, which takes place only in one's inner being—one must be very careful not to misunderstand this—is to recall particularly lively dream-images. One must keep in mind, however, that dream-images are always reminiscences that can never be related directly to anything external and are thus a sort of reaction coming toward one out of one's own inner self. If one experiences to the full the images formed in the way described above, this is something entirely real, and one begins to understand that one is encountering within oneself the spiritual element that actuates the processes of growth, that is the power of growth. One realizes that one has entered into apart of one's human constitution, something within one; something that unites itself with one; something that is active within but that one previously had experienced only unconsciously. Experienced unconsciously in what way? I have told you that from birth until the change of teeth a soul-spiritual entity is at work structuring the human being and that this then emancipates itself to an extent. Later, between the change of teeth and puberty, another such soul-spiritual entity, which dips down in a way into the physical body, awakens the erotic drives and much else as well. All this occurs unconsciously. If, however, we use fully consciously such measures of soul as I have described to observe this permeation of the physical organism by the soul-spiritual, one sees how such processes work within man and how man is actually given over to the external world continually, from birth onward. Nowadays this giving-over of oneself to the external world is held to be nothing but abstract perception or abstract cognition. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of color, sound, and warmth and by all kinds of sense impressions, By elaborating these with our concepts we create yet further impressions that have an effect on us. By experiencing all this consciously we come to see that in the unconscious experience of color- and sound-impressions that we have from childhood onward there is something spiritual that suffuses our organization. And when, for example, we take up the sense of love between the change of teeth and puberty, this is not something originating in the physical body but rather something that the cosmos gives us through the colors, sounds, and streaming warmth that reach us. Warmth is something other than warmth; light something other than light in the physical sense; sound is something other than physical sound. Through our sense impressions we are conscious only of what I would term external sound and external color. And when we surrender ourselves to nature, we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms, and so on of which modern physics and physiology dream; rather, it is spiritual forces that are at work, forces that fashion us between birth and death into what we are as human beings. Once we tread the path of knowledge I have described, we become aware that it is the external world that forms us. We become best able to observe consciously what lives and embodies itself within us when we acquire above all a clear sense that spirit is at work in the external world. lt is of all things phenomenology that enables us to perceive how spirit works within the external world. It is through phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to consciousness, what otherwise we would do unconsciously, by observing how, through the sense world, spiritual forces enter our being and work formatively upon it. Yesterday I pointed out to you that the Eastern sage in a way disregards the significance of Speech, thought, and the perception of the ego. He experiences these things differently and cultivates a different attitude of soul toward these things, because language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego initially tend to lead us away from the spiritual world into social contact with other human beings. In everyday physical existence we purchase our social life at the price of listening right through language, looking through thoughts, and feeling our way right through the perception of the ego. The Eastern sage took upon himself not to listen right through the word but to live within it. He took upon himself not to look right through the thought but to live within the thought, and so forth. We in the West have as our task more to contemplate man himself in following the path into super-sensible worlds. At this point it must be remembered that man bears a certain kind of sensory organization within as well. I have already described the three inner senses through which he becomes aware of his inner being, just as he perceives what goes on outside him. We have a sense of balance by means of which we sense the spatial orientation appropriate to us as human beings and are thereby able to work inside it with our will. We have a sense of movement by means of which we know that we are moving even in the dark: we know this from an inner sensing and not merely because we perceive our changing relationship to other objects we pass. We have an actual inner sense of movement. And we have a sense of life, by means of which we can perceive our general state of well-being, the constant changes in the inner condition of our life forces. These three inner senses work together with the will during man's first seven years. We are guided by our sense of balance, and a being who initially cannot move at all and later can only crawl is transformed into one who can stand upright and walk. This ability to walk upright is effected by the sense of balance, which places us into the world. The sense of movement and the sense of life likewise contribute toward the development of our full humanity. Anybody who is capable of applying the standards of objective observation employed in the scientist's laboratory to the development of man's physical body and his soul-spirit will soon discover how the forces that worked formatively upon man principally during the fast seven years emancipate themselves and begin to assume a different aspect from the time of the change of teeth onward. By this time a person is less intensively connected to that within than he was as a child. A child is closely bound up inwardly with human equilibrium, movement, and life. Something else, however, is evolving simultaneously during this emancipation of balance, movement, and life. There takes place a certain adjustment of the three other senses: the senses of smell, taste, and touch. It is extremely interesting to observe in detail the way in which a child gradually finds his way into life, orienting himself by means of the senses of taste, smell, and touch. Of course, this can be seen most obviously in early life, but anybody trained to do so can see it clearly enough later on as well. In a certain way, the child pushes out of himself balance, movement, and life but at the same time draws more into himself the qualities of the sense of smell, the sense of taste, and the sense of touch. In the course of an extended phase of development the one is, so to speak, exhaled and the other inhaled, so that the forces of balance, movement, and life, which press from within outward, and the qualitative orientations of smell, taste, and touch, which press from without inward, meet within our organism. This is effected by the interpenetration of the two sense-triads. As a result of this interpenetration, there arises within man a firm sense of self; in this way man First experiences himself as a true ego. Now we are cut off from the spirituality of the external world by speech and by our faculties of perceiving thoughts and perceiving the egos of others—and rightly so, for if it were otherwise we could never in this physical life become social beings—in just the same way, inasmuch as the qualities of smell, taste, and touch encounter balance, movement, and life, we are inwardly cut off from the triad life, movement, and balance, which would otherwise reveal itself to us directly. The experiences of the senses of smell, taste, and touch place themselves, as it were, in front of what we would otherwise experience through our sense of balance, our sense of movement, and our sense of life. And the result of this development toward Imagination of which I have spoken consists in this: the Oriental comes to a halt at language in order to live within it; he halts at the thought in order to live there; he halts at the perception of the ego in order to live within it. By these means he makes his way outward into the spiritual world. The Oriental comes to a halt within these; we, by striving for Imagination, by a kind of absorption of external percepts devoid of concepts, engage in an activity that is in a way the opposite of that in which the Oriental engages with regard to language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego. The Oriental comes to a halt at these and enters into them. In striving for Imagination, however, one wends one's way through the sensations of smell, taste, and touch, penetrating into the inner realm so that, by one's remaining undisturbed by sensations of smell, taste, and touch, the experiences stemming from balance, movement, and life come forth to meet one. It is a great moment when one has penetrated through what I have described as the sense-triad of taste, smell, and touch, and one confronts the naked essence of movement, balance, and life. With such a preparation behind us, it is interesting to study what Western mysticism often sets forth. Most certainly, I am very far from decrying the elements of poetry, beauty, and imaginative expression in the writings of many mystics. I most certainly admire what, for instance, St. Theresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and others have to tell us, and indeed Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler. But all that arises in this way reveals itself to the true spiritual scientist as something that arises when one traverses the inward-leading path yet does not penetrate beyond the region of smell, taste, and touch. Read what has been written by individuals who have described with particular clarity what they have experienced in this way. They speak of a tasting of that within, of a tasting regarding what exists as soul-spirit in man's inner being; they also speak of a smelling and, in a certain sense, of a touching. And anybody who knows how to read Mechthild of Magdeburg, for instance, or St. Theresa, in the right way will see that they follow this inward path but never penetrate right through taste, smell, and touch. They use beautiful poetic imagery for their descriptions, but they are speaking only of how one can touch, savor, and sniff oneself inwardly. For it is far less agreeable to see the true nature of reality with senses that are developed truly spiritually than to read the accounts given by voluptuous mysticism—the only term for it—which in the final analysis only gratifies a refined, inward-looking egotism of soul. As I say, much as this mysticism is to be admired—and I do admire it—the true spiritual scientist must realize that it stops halfway: what is manifest in the splendid poetic imagery of Mechthild of Magdeburg, St. Theresa, and the others is really only what is smelt, tasted, and touched before breaking through into the actual inner realm. Truth is occasionally unpleasant, and at times perhaps even cruel, but modern humanity has no business becoming rickety in soul by following a nebulous, imperfect mysticism. What is required today is to penetrate into man's true inner nature with strength of spirit, with the same strength we have achieved in a much more disciplined way for the external world by pursuing natural science. And it is not in vain that we have achieved this. Natural science must not be undervalued! Indeed, we must seek to acquire the disciplined and methodical side of natural science. And it is precisely when one has assimilated this scientific method that one appreciates the achievements of a nebulous mysticism at their true worth, but one also knows that this nebulous mysticism is not what spiritual science must foster. On the contrary, the task of spiritual science is to seek clear comprehension of man's own inner being, whereby a clear, spiritual understanding of the external world is made possible in turn. I know that if I did not speak in the way that truth demands I could enjoy the support of every nebulous, blathering mystic who takes up mysticism in order to satisfy his voluptuous soul. That cannot be our concern here, however; rather, we must seek forces that can be used for life, spiritual forces that are capable of informing our scientific and social life. When one has penetrated as far as that which lives in the sense of balance, the sense of life, and the sense of movement, one has reached something that one experiences initially as the true inner being of man because of its transparency. The very nature of the thing shows us that we cannot penetrate any deeper. But then again one has more than enough at this initial stage, for what we discover is not the stuff of nebulous, mystical dreams. What one finds is a true organology, and above all one finds within oneself the essence of that which is within equilibrium, of that which is in movement, of that which is suffused with life. One finds this within oneself. Then, after experiencing this, something entirely extraordinary has occurred. Then, at the appropriate moment, one begins to notice something. An essential prerequisite is, as I have said, to have thought through The Philosophy of Freedom beforehand. This is then left, so to speak, to one side, while pursuing the inner path of contemplation, of meditation. One has advanced as far as balance, movement, and life. One lives within this life, this movement, this balance. Entirely parallel with our pursuit of the way of contemplation and meditation but without any other activity on our part, our thinking regarding The Philosophy of Freedom has undergone a transformation. What can be experienced in such a philosophy of freedom in pure thinking has, as a result of our having worked inwardly on our souls in another sphere, become something utterly different. lt has become fuller, richer in content. While on the one hand we have penetrated into our inner being and have deepened our power of Imagination, on the other hand we have raised what resulted from our mental work on The Philosophy of Freedom up out of ordinary consciousness. Thoughts that formerly had floated more or less abstractly within pure thinking have been transformed into substantial forces that are alive in our consciousness: what once was pure thought is now Inspiration. We have developed Imagination, and pure thinking has become Inspiration. Following this path further, we become able to keep apart what we have gained following two paths that must be sharply differentiated: on the one hand, what we have obtained as Inspiration from pure thinking—the life that at a lower level is thinking, and then becomes a thinking raised to Inspiration—and on the other hand what we experience as conditions of equilibrium, movement, and life. Now we can bring these modes of experience together. We can unite the inner with the outer. The fusion of Imagination and Inspiration brings us in turn to Intuition. What have we accomplished now? Well, I would like to answer this question by approaching it from another side. First of all I must draw attention to the steps taken by the Oriental who wishes to rise further after having schooled himself by means of the mantras, after having lived within the language, within the word. He now learns not only to live in the rhythms of language but also in a certain way to experience breathing consciously, in a certain way to experience breathing artificially by altering it in the most varied ways. For him this is the next highest step—but again not something that can be taken over directly by the West. What does the Eastern student of yoga attain by surrendering himself to conscious, regulated, varied breathing? Oh, he experiences something quite extraordinary when he inhales. When inhaling he experiences a quality of air that is not found when we experience air as a purely physical substance but only when we unite ourselves with the air and thus comprehend it spiritually. As he breathes in, a genuine student of yoga experiences something that works formatively upon his whole being, that works spiritually; something that does not expend itself in the life between birth and death, but, entering into us through the spirituality of the outer air, engenders in us something that passes with us through the portal of death. To experience the breathing process consciously means taking part in something that persists when we have laid aside the physical body. For to experience the breathing process consciously is to experience the reaction of our inner being to inhalation. In experiencing this we experience something that preceded birth in our existence as soul-spirit—or let us say preceded our conception—something that had already cooperated in shaping us as embryos and then continued to work within our organism in childhood. To grasp the breathing process consciously means to comprehend ourselves beyond birth and death. The advance from an experience of the aphorism and the word to an experience of the breathing process represented a further penetration into an inspired comprehension of the eternal in man. We Westerners must experience much the same thing—but in a different sphere. What, in fact, is the process of perception? It is nothing but a modified process of inhalation. As we breathe in, the air presses upon our diaphragm and upon the whole of our being. Cerebral fluid is forced up through the spinal column into the brain. In this way a connection is established between breathing and cerebral activity. And the part of the breathing that can be discerned as active within the brain works upon our sense activity as perception. Perception is thus a kind of branch of inhalation. In exhalation, on the other hand, cerebral fluid descends and exerts pressure on the circulation of the blood. The descent of cerebral fluid is bound up with the activity of the will and also of exhalation. Anybody who really studies The Philosophy of Freedom, however, will discover that when we achieve pure thinking, thinking and willing coincide. Pure thinking is fundamentally an expression of will. Thus pure thinking turns out to be related to what the Oriental experienced in the process of exhalation. Pure thinking is related to exhalation just as perception is related to inhalation. We have to go through the same process as the yogi but in a way that is, so to speak, pushed back more into the inner life. Yoga depends upon a regulation of the breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, and in this way comes into contact with the eternal in man. What can Western man do? He can raise into clear soul experiences perception on the one hand and thinking on the other. He can unite in his inner experience perception and thinking, which are otherwise united only abstractly, formally, and passively, so that inwardly, in his soul-spirit, he has the same experience as he has physically in breathing in and out. Inhalation and exhalation are physical experiences: when they are harmonized, one consciously experiences the eternal. In everyday life we experience thinking and perception. By bringing mobility into the life of the soul, one experiences the pendulum, the rhythm, the continual interpenetrating vibration of perception and thinking. A higher reality evolves for the Oriental in the process of inhalation and exhalation; the Westerner achieves a kind of breathing of the soul-spirit in place of the physical breathing of the yogi. He achieves this by developing within himself the living process of modified inhalation in perception and modified exhalation in pure thinking, by weaving together concept, thinking, and perceiving. And gradually, by means of this rhythmic pulse, by means of this rhythmic breathing process in perception and thinking, he struggles to rise up to spiritual reality in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. And when I indicated in my book The Philosophy of Freedom, at first only philosophically, that reality arises out of the interpenetration of perception and thinking, I intended, because the book was meant as a schooling for the soul, to show what Western man can do in order to enter the spiritual world itself. The Oriental says: systole, diastole; inhalation, exhalation. In place of these the Westerner must put perception and thinking. Where the Oriental speaks of the development of physical breathing, we in the West say: development of a breathing of the soul-spirit within the cognitional process through perception and thinking. All this had to be contrasted with what can be experienced as a kind of dead end in Western spiritual evolution. Let me explain what I mean. In 1841 Michelet, the Berlin philosopher, published posthumously Hegel's works on natural philosophy. Hegel had worked at the end of the eighteenth century, together with Schelling, at laying the foundations of a system of natural philosophy. Schelling, as a young firebrand, had constructed his natural philosophy in a remarkable way out of what he called “intellectual Intuition” [intellektuale Anschauung]. He reached a point, however, where he could make no further progress. He immersed himself in the mystics at a certain point. His work, Bruno, or Concerning the Divine and Natural Principle in Things, and his fine treatise on human freedom and the origin of evil testify so wonderfully to this immersion. But for all this he could make no progress and began to hold back from expressing himself at all. He kept promising to follow up with a philosophy that would reveal the true nature of those hidden forces at which his earlier natural philosophy had only hinted. When Michelet published Hegel's natural philosophy in 1841, Schelling's long-expected and oft-promised “philosophy of revelation” had still not been vouchsafed to the public. He was summoned to Berlin. What he h ad to offer, however, was not the actual spirit that was to permeate the natural philosophy he had founded. He had striven for an intellectual intuition. He ground to a halt at this point, because he was unable to use Imagination to enter the sphere of which I spoke to you today. And so he was stuck there. Hegel, who had a more rational intellect, had taken over Schelling's thoughts and carried them further by applying pure thinking to the observation of nature. That was the origin of Hegel's natural philosophy. And so one had Schelling's unfulfilled promise to bring forth nature out of the spirit, and then one had Hegel's natural philosophy, which was discarded by science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was misunderstood, to be sure, but it was bound to remain so, because it was impossible to gain any kind of connection to the ideas contained in Hegel's natural philosophy with regard to phenomenology, the true observation of nature. It is a kind of wonderful incident: Schelling traveling from Munich to Berlin, where great things are expected of him, and it turns out that he has nothing to say. It was a disappointment for all who believed that through Hegel's natural philosophy revelations about nature would emerge from pure thinking. Thus it was in a way demonstrated historically, in that Schelling had attained the level of intellectual intuition but not that of genuine Imagination and in that Hegel showed as well that if pure thinking does not lead on to Imagination or to Inspiration—that is, to the level of nature's secrets ... it was shown that the evolution of the West had thereby run up against a dead end. There was as yet nothing to counter what had come over from the Orient and engendered skepticism; one could counter with nothing that was suffused with the spirit. And anyone who had immersed himself lovingly in Schelling and Hegel and has thus been able to see, with love in his heart, the limitations of Western philosophy, had to strive for anthroposophy. He had to strive to bring about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the West, so that we will possess something that works creatively in the spirit, just as the East had worked in the spirit through systole and diastole in their interaction. We in the West can allow perception and thinking to resound through one another in the soul-spirit [das geistig-seelische Ineinanderklingenlassen], through which we can rise to something more than a merely abstract science. It opens the way to a living science, which is the only kind of science that enables us to dwell within the element of truth. After all the failures of the Kantian, Schellingian, and Hegelian philosophies, we need a philosophy that, by revealing the way of the spirit, can show the real relationship between truth and science, a spiritualized science, in which truth can really live to the great benefit of future human evolution. |
347. The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit: Early Earth Conditions (continued)
23 Sep 1922, Dornach Tr. Automated Rudolf Steiner |
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That is no longer the case. But the earth is constantly changing and will also look quite different in the future than it does today. But what can we see from all that we have learned now? |
In the past, people used to count in lunar months when talking about the gestation period of a child in the womb. Where did this come from, gentlemen? Because it was still known that the development of the child in the womb is connected to the moon. |
What is fertilized there, what becomes an egg inside, is only a replica of the old earth egg. So it is no wonder that when the child is born, the moon story still haunts it, and even the time during which the child is carried is determined by the moon. |
347. The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit: Early Earth Conditions (continued)
23 Sep 1922, Dornach Tr. Automated Rudolf Steiner |
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It will be necessary, gentlemen, to take a closer look at the subject we have been discussing. Last time, I was able to show you what strange creatures once populated the Earth and how these truly remarkable creatures behaved. I was finally able to point out to you that the whole Earth itself was once a living being. You see, when we look at all the animals that once lived on Earth – last time I spoke to you about ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, megatheriums and sirenians – look at all these animals, of which remains are still present in the various museums, we find that they have one peculiarity: they are mostly covered on the outside with a scale armor and have powerful, thick forearms, paws. So, of course, you could not only have gone for a walk on such an animal – they were big enough for that – but you could also have beaten it with a mighty hammer, and the animal would not have been very uncomfortably affected by any of it, because the whole animal was surrounded by such a scale armor. In the small, however, only as very small dwarfs, only the turtles or crocodiles of these ancient animals have survived today. I would like to say that in the small format, turtles and crocodiles are what these animals once were in their huge size. So you have to imagine that these ancient animals had such a horn-like coat consisting of individual horn plates. Now we have to get an idea of where these animals actually got this horn-like coat from. We have to study history from a very young age, not as a human being from a very young age, but how history develops from a very young age. Imagine that a dog wounds itself somewhere. The animals have strange healing instincts. You will have already seen what a dog does when it wounds itself somewhere. When a dog has a wound somewhere, the first thing it does is lick it; it covers it with saliva. And then, once it has covered it with saliva, it likes to lie in the sun and let the sun shine on it. And what happens then? A kind of scab forms over the wound. So that one can say: If this is the dog's wound (see drawing), then he covers it with saliva so that the wound is coated with saliva over its entire surface. Then he lets the sun shine on it, and the sun makes a hard crust out of what it brews there, together with the saliva, and underneath it heals. So the dog has a very strange healing instinct. It does the right thing based on its instinct. Now we can expand a little on what we have observed. We can look at another strange phenomenon that will lead us to understand something like this wound healing here. You know, we breathe in the air. When we breathe in the air, we get oxygen inside. The oxygen spreads throughout our body. And when the oxygen spreads throughout our body, we can live. We would suffocate immediately if we could not get the oxygen. But what do we do for it? We are not exactly very grateful people for the air that gives us oxygen. We are actually quite ungrateful beings towards the air, because we combine carbon with this oxygen in ourselves, and that becomes carbonic acid, and we breathe that out again. This is actually quite ungrateful towards our environment, because we are constantly polluting the air. If someone were to stand in carbonic acid, they would suffocate. What is made of the beautiful, good breathing air inside us is what we use to pollute our environment. We constantly spread carbonic acid gas around us, in which no being – not a human being, but also not a living being that is animal-like – could live. So you see, animal life actually basically consists of the fact that it itself constantly draws what it needs to live from its surroundings, but returns the deadly substance to its surroundings. That is what animal life consists of. However, with this animal life, things would soon go badly on the present earth if all creatures behaved as indecently as humans and animals. You see, humans and animals pollute the air. And if all creatures behaved as indecently as humans and animals, then our earth would have been destroyed long ago, with nothing left to live on; then our earth would have long since become one big cemetery. But the good thing is that plants don't behave indecently. They do the opposite. Just as we absorb oxygen and pollute the air all around, so plants absorb carbon dioxide and retain the carbon, while releasing the oxygen. So that actually only because there are plants and especially forests on earth, life on earth can exist. If there were no forests on earth, or if large companies - some of them are already doing it - were to cut down the forests, life on earth would become much less healthy. That is precisely the point, that we need the forests on earth. If we only look at the wood, then of course we are gradually making life on earth impossible by cutting down the forests. So we can say: on earth it is arranged in such a way that people and animals actually behave quite indecently, because they pollute everything, and the plants and the forests, in turn, make everything tidy. Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is the way it is on Earth now, but it was not always like that on Earth. We just have to be clear about the fact that the Earth has changed, that it was quite different in the time I was talking about last Wednesday; you have realized that. Because when you go for a walk now, you won't come across an ichthyosaurus up on the Gempen, as you might have done back then. That is no longer the case. But the earth is constantly changing and will also look quite different in the future than it does today. But what can we see from all that we have learned now? We can say: That which is inside a person, what he gives of himself, cannot sustain him. He must get something else; on the present earth he must get what the plants give him in order to live. We cannot live on what we have inside us alone, it destroys us. So you can see this quite clearly: that which is useful inside a person destroys us when it comes from outside. Inside, we would be quite ill if we had too much oxygen. But from the outside, oxygen must be supplied continuously. So what is harmful on the inside is beneficial when it comes from the outside. What is beneficial on the inside is harmful when it comes from the outside. You see, gentlemen, it is so important to realize that what is beneficial internally is harmful when it comes from outside, and what is harmful internally is beneficial when it comes from outside. This is so important that if you do not understand this, you do not understand anything. Now we can say: We now know from contemporary life that something completely different must approach us from the outside than we have within us. Something completely different must approach us from the outside. Let us now go back to the old days, having acquired a few concepts from the present. Let us go back and imagine ourselves in the time when the ichthyosaurs walked on the earth, half walking, half swimming, and when the plesiosaurs hopped around on the earth. We place ourselves in this time. Yes, but that was also a time that was preceded by another. Now, what was it like on Earth in those ancient times, before there were ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs? Yes, gentlemen, according to the remains we have from this ancient, very ancient time, the animals that existed back then were even clumsier than the later ones. You know, a plesiosaur – you can see this if you look at one in any museum – with its huge size, with its heavy scale armor, as heavy as a knight's armor in the Middle Ages, and with that it was a little uncomfortable to move, and with its clumsy legs – they were terribly clumsy creatures. So, you know, they weren't exactly nimble guys. But these clumsy creatures still had something that resembled feet, which were like fins that they could use to swim and even to hold on to something. So, after all, I would say that was already a kind of modern era. But the animals that existed before these clumsy ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and megatheriums were much more clumsy, because actually didn't have much more than a soft body with all sorts of things thrown together in it: a bit at the front that looked a bit like a head, a fairly long tail at the back, and a huge, huge scaly armor over it. If you have ever seen an oyster, for example, then you can imagine that a turtle is a bit like a dwarf. Inside it has only the whole mucus-like body, and a shell around it. Now, if you imagine the shell a little differently, the scales like those of a turtle and inside it also a soft oyster body, then you get roughly the animals that were once on Earth before the ichthyosaurs and megatheriums were on Earth. The Earth was very thick then, much thicker than milk. Everything that is now mountains was dissolved. So it was a very thick thing. In this thick sauce - the whole Earth was an awfully thick sauce in space - swam such a giant oyster. Compared to it, our whole carpentry here would have been a dwarf. They were such giant oysters that if you had drawn today's France on its back, it would have comfortably fit on it. The oldest of these animals were so huge because the Earth was also still huge. So once upon a time there were giant animals that actually consisted only of a slimy mass and that could only move like oysters, except that the oysters must have been in much thinner water. And these slimy animals, which had a huge tortoise shell, swam in this thick earth. So you see, the earth was really something like this, like if you imagine a huge thick soup today and dumplings in it. But you have to imagine the dumplings as being very thick on one side, so that you would break your teeth if you bit into them on that side, and very soft on the other. You could then lift one side of these dumplings off; then you would get something like a hat. And the other side, that would be very soft, you could eat that. This was much softer for these animals than the one they swam in, than this thick earth. Therefore, it was also the case with these animals, as it is today only certain very small animals have preserved themselves. You will have seen snails crawling before. When the snails crawl, you can follow the trail of these snails; it is full of this slime - you will have seen that - that the snail leaves behind. Today, the sun dries up the slime. Today it is not very important. But think of the ancient times, when the earth was not as solid. These animals also left this slime in the thick earth soup, and it mixed with this thick earth soup. So these animals have always been very useful in this thick earth soup. Today, such things can only be traced in very small traces when you walk on the path and it has rained a lot. You can see this especially here at the Goetheanum: then the earthworms crawl out. You will have seen this already, during special rainy seasons the earthworms crawl out everywhere. Where are the earthworms otherwise? They are usually inside the earth, crawling inside the earth and making holes where they crawl through. You see, if it were not for these earthworms, our fields would be much less fertile. Because what these earthworms leave behind in the earth makes the soil fertile. We must not imagine that anything in nature is unnecessary. And so it was with these giant oysters in ancient times. They constantly secreted what they gave off as mucus into the earth soup, and thereby always refreshed this earth soup, always, always refreshed it. But the story is this: in today's soil – yes, however much the snails and earthworms mix in what they secrete – in today's soil, it dies again. What the earthworms provide in the form of dung is very useful in the arable soil, and in a sense what the snails provide in the form of dung is also useful in the arable soil. Not only in the arable soil, but in the meadows, what is on the earth, where the snail slime sinks in, is a very, very good fertilizer. But you see, what goes into the earth through today's animals does not come to life. But in the time I am talking about now, when these giant oysters deposited their products in the earth soup, there really was something very strange – something like that still happens today. Right, fertilization in certain lower animals, even in fairly high animals, does not occur in the same way as in higher animals and in humans, but fertilization occurs, let's say, in certain fish-like or even amphibian-like or toad-like animals, in such a way that the eggs are laid, laid somewhere, so that there is a clump of eggs somewhere that the female has laid; and the male then simply drops his seminal fluid on top of them, outside the female, and only then are the eggs fertilized, outside the female. This still happens today. So you can say: the female lays the eggs somewhere and goes away. The male finds these eggs, fertilizes them, and also goes away. So fertilization takes place externally. But it cannot happen, nothing comes of it, unless the sun shines on these fertilized eggs. If the sun does not shine on them, then nothing comes of it, they die. But if the sun shines on these fertilized eggs, then new animals come of it. This still happens today. In the time when these giant oysters swam around in the earth soup, this mucus, when it entered the earth, had the effect that such huge animals developed again and again from the earth itself. The old ones died, but the new animals developed out of the earth itself. The earth itself continually gave birth to such extremely clumsy but gigantic animals. So the earth was such that it was itself fertilized by what these animals secreted. So you can imagine: once there was one earth life; the earth was completely one living being. But this life had to be maintained by the mucus secreted by these animals up above. If this thick soup of the earth had been alone, these thick animals here would soon have died out too. They secreted, and through that the life of the earth was continually maintained, so that the earth continually drove such animals out of itself. They then fertilized the earth itself again, and it could now again grow such animals out of itself. But these animals, they could not have secreted this slime if something else had not been there. You see, the earth was an awfully thick soup; but I told you: the slime of the animals was much thinner than this earth soup, much thinner. How did it come about that the animals could have such thin slime? That would have been quite impossible, that the animals could have a thinner slime than the earth itself. The earth was also a pulp, a slime, but a very thick one; but these thinner lumps of slime were constantly emerging. How did they come about? You see, gentlemen, if you have only a glass of water and in it a liquid, water in which salt is dissolved, it can happen that the salt falls down. The salt collects as a sediment at the bottom; but then the water is thinner. Only when the salt was dissolved was the water thick. Now the water has become thinner because the salt is out. So later you have thinner water above, and much thicker salt water below. And if I could turn this glass over now – no, if I did that, of course all the salt water would just flow out, and the story would not have formed. But with these ancient animals, it was like that, it turned itself over. With these old critters, it was like this: there was the thick earth; something had formed there. There was the scale armor on top and slime further down. What was the scale armor? That was nothing other than what had separated out from the thick earthen mass. Just as salt separates downward from water, so this thick, very thick mass, which then formed a scale armor like that of turtles, separated upward from the thickness of the earthen mass, but upward, so that the thinner part remained below. And so this inverted glass, or head, could lift itself out of the water. Only the salt came to the top. And what happened to this salt? Yes, gentlemen, now we go back to what the dog does when it has a wound. When the dog has a wound, it licks it off. Then it lets the sun shine on it; then it becomes thick and kills whatever is in the wound. Otherwise, bacteria would get in and the wound would get bigger, and the whole dog would be destroyed. You see, a scab forms, a scab of what is inside. The mucus that the dog brings to the wound is something internal; when the sun shines on it, it thickens the mucus through the warmth. It was the same with these animals in those ancient times. The sun shone on this thick earth soup, and because the sun shone on it, such thickening occurred in some places as it occurs on a wound in a dog. These were the shells. And because a thickening formed, there was a thinner mass of mucus underneath. And so these giant oysters were formed. But, you see, these giant oysters could not have formed at all if the sun had not shone. It would have been impossible. So now we have the strange fact that we have the Earth – I will draw this very small now –; the Sun shines on the Earth during the day, and the Sun brings out these giant oysters from the Earth. So we can say: Once upon a time, the Earth was a thick soup, and because the Sun shone on it from the outside, such animals formed. But all that would have been of no use at the time, because now the earth, when these animals left their thin slime behind them as they swam through the soup, could have been fertilized. That would have been of no use. Yes, so the earth must have been something else in its interior. It must have been similar to an egg. Only in this way could it have been fertilized. Is that not obvious? The earth was once, so to speak, like an egg. Only in this way could it have been fertilized. We have to study what it is like with such an egg so that it can be fertilized, because we come to a state of the earth when there was a thick earth soup. The beings that could fertilize, I mean, the male beings, we found them in the old days; but if the earth should have been the generally female being – we have not yet found that, we now have to look for it again. We have to figure out how the earth could have such a huge egg. You see, gentlemen, if you want to come up with something like that, it means looking at the world a little. And strangely enough, I will now have to draw your attention to a completely different area first, to something that still exists today, but really, I would say, in such a rarefied state that many people are not aware of it in their consciousness. But it is really not just out of a certain sense of mystery that poets, when they want to depict the development of love between two lovers, have them go out into the moonlight. There is something about moonlight that has an extraordinary effect on the human imagination. You may think that this is not really part of it, but it is. Moonlight drives out the imagination of man. And you see, it is something quite remarkable that moonlight drives out the imagination of man. When people who are currently scholars sometimes have such a surge of cleverness, they sometimes come up with very cute things, nice things. For example, a while ago in Paris there was a scholar who said to himself: With all the medicines we now have in medicine, you can do so terribly little for people, and – it is really quite strange that a Parisian scholar has finally come up with it – if you wanted to make people healthier, you could do something different. And, gentlemen, be amazed: the scholar in Paris advised people to read Goethe's “Faust” a lot – it will make them healthier than absorbing all that stuff that only stimulates the mind – because Goethe's “Faust” stimulates the imagination, and imagination is healthy. Even a materialistic scholar has found reading Goethe's “Faust” so good because it stimulates the imagination that he said: Today's people are so clever, they only use their minds; but the mind actually makes you sick. But if people would read “Faust” and put themselves in all the images that are in “Faust,” they would be much healthier. So the scholar wanted people to imbibe a little of the healthy power of growth. People should imbibe a little of the healthy power of growth! Yes, you see, that was a moment of insight, of which today's science has few. Today's science had a healthy moment. This is healthy because it encourages you to digest better. It is really true: a person digests better when they study Goethe's “Faust” than when they study all the learned works. There they ruin their stomachs. With Goethe's “Faust” the stomach becomes healthier and healthier; but so do the other organs. And what is the reason for this? Well, because Goethe's “Faust” comes from the imagination, not from the intellect. Imagine, when a person lets themselves be inspired by the moon, then their imagination is stimulated. So, the moon stimulates the growth forces in humans. But today this is the case to a very small extent. Isn't it true that a person feels a little warmed inside, so he feels his growth forces stimulated inwardly when he goes for a moonwalk? That's true. But it doesn't come into consideration much. But the moon is connected to everything that life means to a person. I can give you a small fact that shows extremely strongly how the moon is connected with life. You see, today, when people are paying attention to some things that people once knew - remember, for example, what I told you here about the Roman Janus head with the two faces - you can imagine that people used to know more than they do today. They may not have been “smarter,” but they knew more. Isn't that so? Today, when everything that people once knew has been buried by people's cleverness, today one says, “Well, a human child is carried for nine months.” But medicine, which sometimes, just as it has preserved the Latin language, has also preserved old ideas – today's doctors don't want to know anything about it, but sometimes these old ideas are still there – says: the child is carried for ten months. Where does that come from, gentlemen? Well, if you do the math: a lunar month has about 28 days; ten times 28 = 280 days. A month as we have it today, calculated at 30 days, if you take that nine times, you have about the same = 270 days. This means that the nine months we have today are ten lunar months. That is the same time. In the past, people used to count in lunar months when talking about the gestation period of a child in the womb. Where did this come from, gentlemen? Because it was still known that the development of the child in the womb is connected to the moon. It is connected to the moon. It was once known and can now be established again through anthroposophical studies that it is the moon that causes the child to be able to develop as a living being in the first place. But this moon only affects female beings in the human and animal kingdom because they are designed to be affected. The moon no longer has an effect on the earth. It no longer produces eggs there. And yet, if you study the matter properly, you come to the conclusion that it is not only in a subtle sense that the imagination is stimulated and that our growth forces and we are set in motion when we go for a walk on the moon. The moon has a revitalizing effect in us, but it has such a strong revitalizing effect in the human and animal female body that it actually equips the child or the animal with growth forces. Yes, you see, the moon, shining down from the sky, does not cause the earth itself to grow, because the earth is already far too dead today. So this earth, which could once be fertilized, must have been more alive. And now you remember that I told you that what is inside a person, when it comes in from the outside, is harmful. So the moon, which shines down on the earth today, can no longer bring forth life. Why? Because its light comes from the outside, just as when the air that we ourselves have given off comes from the outside. Then it can no longer invigorate us internally. Today, the moon can no longer do anything with the earth itself. Today, the moon can only do something in the animal and human body because it is protected. But where must the moon have been at one time so that it could make the earth itself a living being? It cannot make it a living being outside of the earth. It must have been inside the earth! Just as carbonic acid, when it is outside, can no longer make us alive, but must be inside, must develop itself alive inside, so the moonlight must not have been outside once, but inside the earth. So imagine, gentlemen: back then, when these beings were there, the moon was not outside the earth at all, but inside it, dissolved in the thick soup. It was not yet limited at all, but it was in there, an even thicker ball. It could make the whole earth into an egg. It just comes to mind that the moon, which today only affects the imagination and the female fertilized body, that the moon, which is up in the sky today, was once inside the earth. But then it must also have come out at some time. And you see, gentlemen, here we come to the tremendously important moment in the evolution of the earth: the moon, which is always outside today, was once inside the earth. The earth excreted it. It now surrounds it from the outside. If we study the entire body of the earth, something remarkable comes to light. If we study the body of the Earth, we actually see that the body of the Earth consists of water, and the continents, the land masses, are floating in this water, just as these giant animals once swam in it. Europe, Asia, Africa are floating in the water, just as these giant animals once swam in the Earth soup, in the thick Earth soup. And when we study what it looks like – you know, it doesn't look the same – then we can still see today from the hollowing out of the earth and the shifting of the continents that the moon once flew out of where the Pacific Ocean is today. The moon was once inside the earth, flew out. It first hardened on the outside. We are now looking back at an ancient state of the earth. Then the earth still had its moon inside its body. The moon made it into a mother with its substance, and the paternal substance was evoked by the sun, because the sun continually produced such lumps of slime, which surrounded it on the outside with a thick coat of horn. That was caused by the sunbeam. And these floating lumps of slime have continually fertilized what was at the bottom of the earth soup and what was kept alive by the moon. So that the earth was a huge egg and was continually fertilized by what the sun had done. Yes, gentlemen, if history had gone on like that, it would have created a rather uncomfortable situation on Earth. The moon would have flown out. The earth would have become barren, and eventually everything would have died. What has been done there? Although the moon's flight out has caused the earth to die, something of the old fertilizing has been preserved in the maternal animal and human body. Before that, there was no birth at all in the way that there is now, right? Just as when you make a new loaf of bread, you take some of the old yeast and then add it, so there is still some of the old substance that you took from the moon remaining in the female bodies, so that it can be fertilized. What is fertilized there, what becomes an egg inside, is only a replica of the old earth egg. So it is no wonder that when the child is born, the moon story still haunts it, and even the time during which the child is carried is determined by the moon. Isn't it true that the baron's son must also stretch himself according to the inheritance his father leaves him? The fertilized egg must do the same, which actually comes from the old moon soup. It must still be guided by the moon, because that is where the inheritance comes from. In general, you see, in older times people knew much more about these things. I will give you the reasons why once more. In older times, people knew much more about these things, and they said: Sol, the sun, is masculine. It does, after all, represent the masculine. This is still the case in Latin. Sol, the sun, is masculine. Luna, the moon, is feminine; in Latin it is a feminine word. Sol, the solar, fertilizes Luna, the feminine. In the German language the story is completely reversed; we say the sun and the moon, whereas in reality the sun represents the masculine and the moon the feminine. That is how confused the story has become. If we wanted to speak correctly, we would actually have to say in German: der Sonn und die Mond. But the ancient Latins already made a joke about it and said — this is just a joke with which I want to conclude today's reflection; I just wanted to give you something here that will be much more evident next time — the ancient Latins said: First we have such a moon (see drawing); then the moon always waxes, becoming like this, and then it waxes, becoming like this; then it wanes again, becoming like this. And you see, if we take these words in the Romance languages, for example in French, we can turn this (see drawing, waning crescent) into a C, and this ( waxing moon, first quarter) into a D; but then we get croitre = to wax. But when it is waning, the moon is not waxing when it makes a C! On the other hand, when it is decroitre = waning, it waxes. So that when we look up at the sky, the moon tells us, “I am waxing,” when it is actually waning, and vice versa. This is where the saying comes from: the moon is a liar. It lies to you. But there is a deeper meaning to this. People gradually became embarrassed to talk about the moon-related because the moon-related is connected to the origin of man. It gradually became something that was not talked about. And people lost the ability to talk about the moon-related in the right way. That is why the moon also became a liar. When you looked at it, it no longer said anything to people that they could relate to. Doctors gradually stopped talking about the fact that a child remains in the mother's womb for ten lunar months and started talking about the nine solar months, which are then roughly the same length of time. But in reality it is ten lunar months, not nine solar months. This is connected with the moon and comes from the fact that the earth once carried the moon in its belly, gave birth to the moon and threw it out into space. Now, gentlemen, think about this: after all, I am not telling you anything different from what someone would tell you today when they talk about an old nebula, about a vapor from which the Earth was separated, and from which the Moon emerged. But that is all just a mechanical, materialistic thought! No amount of vapors could ever give rise to anything living. But what I have told you is not an old vapor. You can create as much vapor in the boiler as you like and allow something to split off – but what I am telling you leads you back to reality. And that is the reality, not the vapor from which Jupiter is said to have split off and the Earth; and when the Earth was still the same as Jupiter, it threw out the Moon. The real moon is connected with the whole growth and even with the reproduction of man, as I said, and the earth once had its own power of reproduction in it, was maternal earth, and was fertilized by the animals that were up there with their shells, and by the sunshine. The moon force in the earth has been fertilized by the sunshine. Yes, you can see how we gradually move out of the earth into space. Of course, I am making a bit of a demand on your attention, but you can see that you can actually learn something real from it. |
69b. Knowledge and Immortality: Knowledge and Immortality
19 Feb 1910, Düsseldorf Rudolf Steiner |
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That it need not be so can be seen if one accepts the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. What knowledge of the sensory world is comes about through the stimulus of the sensory world. |
But this moment must take place through his will, in full consciousness. He would be like a sleeper if he could awaken nothing in his own soul. But although all outer impressions fall silent, he learns to unfold strong powers; he draws out of the deep recesses of his soul what slumbers there. |
That is also a matter of development. A four-year-old child cannot count. But it would be a false conclusion to say that this is not a human being, because humans can count. |
69b. Knowledge and Immortality: Knowledge and Immortality
19 Feb 1910, Düsseldorf Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear attendees! When a person, after a day's work and toils, takes a little time to reflect and tries to find his way in the life of the soul, the question arises as to how the individual facts of life, how the individual experiences are connected with the whole human destiny, with the great goal of human life in general. One of the questions that then arises for the soul is undoubtedly that of the meaning of human knowledge. When we talk about knowledge, we can initially mean that knowledge which relates to the direct services of practical life, to everything that enables us to get to know the outside world in such a way that we can put it at the service of our practical interests. The question becomes somewhat different when we consider knowledge that attempts to penetrate the deeper foundations of life, the riddles of existence – knowledge that does not lead us to an immediately practical work and activity. It is said that man has an immediate urge to know and that knowledge is valuable in itself. Those who look deeper will hardly be satisfied with such an answer. What value would knowledge have if it were only an inner image, only a repetition of what is outside in the world? Why should that which is weaving in the world be effective in the outer world and be repeated in one's own soul only as in a mirror? Is it really only the satisfaction of a soul urge that pushes for knowledge that reaches beyond the everyday? This question will occupy us today: the goal and destiny, essence and significance of human knowledge. If we mean the concept of knowledge that many people have today, which consists in saying that knowledge should provide us with a true reflection of what the world is experiencing, then it will not be easy to relate knowledge to the great goals and tasks of human existence. We will have to ask ourselves: Is knowledge really only the repetition of something external? Or is it one of the forces that must work in our soul in order to advance it on the paths it must traverse in its existence in the world? This question cannot be answered by external science; it can only be answered if we consider the whole human being. External science only provides us with information about what our senses perceive and our minds grasp. But beyond this ordinary science, there is something that is trying to become part of our entire spiritual life today, which can be called spiritual science or anthroposophy. What does theosophical spiritual science seek to comprehend? It seeks to comprehend the whole human being. Let us first agree on what that means, the whole human being. When we look at a person, we see two strictly separate states within the normal human existence of today. These two states, which life presents to us, are so familiar to the human being that he does not even notice that the greatest riddles of existence are hidden in them. We express these states in the words “waking and sleeping”. We recall that from time immemorial many philosophies have called sleep the little brother of death. We can combine these words with two others, namely with the words “life and death”. In these words we have a large part of what we can count among the riddles of existence. Let us try, starting from what presents itself to us in the most ordinary way, to understand the changing states of waking and sleeping. In the waking state, we try to comprehend all the impressions that constantly flow into our soul - impressions that our senses transmit to us, everything that fills us with joy, desire and pain, in short, what constitutes what we call our mental life. We see this ebb and flow of drives, desires, passions, and so on, plunging into an indeterminate darkness in the evening. During sleep, it transitions into another state, that of unconsciousness. It would be absurd to say that the human being as a being of soul disappears in the evening and is reborn anew in the morning. We must ask ourselves: where is that which works in us throughout the day, where is it when we let our soul life sink into an indeterminate darkness in the evening? We are immediately pointed to answers that cannot be given from an ordinary, sensory perspective, because that perspective escapes precisely that which hides behind the nocturnal state in the evening. The question of where the soul is at night can only be answered by theosophical spiritual science, because it rises from the knowledge of the sensual to the knowledge of the supersensible, from the visible to the invisible. We need to come to an understanding about how theosophical spiritual science can arrive at such supersensible insights by once again taking a brief look at what really fulfills our entire life during the day. We can say that we live with our soul during the day through external stimulation, through external impressions. In the evening, the external stimuli fade away, creating the emptiness of the sleeping state. But because a person in the normal life of today's existence can lead a soul life only when external perceptions evoke from his soul that which we are currently experiencing, we can imagine that the inner work of the soul dies, withers away when the external stimuli are not there. Must it be so? That it need not be so can be seen if one accepts the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. What knowledge of the sensory world is comes about through the stimulus of the sensory world. Supersensible knowledge can only come about through the soul's willingness to unfold work within itself, in order to develop powers and abilities even when there are no stimuli from the external sensory world. The possibility of developing such inner powers is given to us by the method of spiritual schooling. This method is there for those who want to penetrate into the knowledge of the supersensible world. This method can only be briefly hinted at here. Those who want to get to know it thoroughly can find it in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. We shall only briefly indicate here how man can find within himself the abilities to ascend to knowledge of the higher worlds. The first thing is that man learns to artificially evoke, through a strong willpower, what otherwise only comes in the state of unconsciousness, namely, what man experiences when the sensory impressions cease. He must be able to command all outer impressions to stop; all outer impressions around him must fall silent, just as they do in the evening when we fall asleep. But this moment must take place through his will, in full consciousness. He would be like a sleeper if he could awaken nothing in his own soul. But although all outer impressions fall silent, he learns to unfold strong powers; he draws out of the deep recesses of his soul what slumbers there. No outer efforts are needed; they are intimate soul processes. There is a sinking into strong, vigorous thoughts, which are not given from without, but which the soul forms for itself. This is meditation or concentration, as it is called – a drawing together of thoughts. Without external impressions we must feel joy and sorrow. The spiritual researcher lets powerful, strong thoughts arise in his own soul, thoughts that have nothing to do with the external world, and these are ideals as well as impulses of the will. These must have a stronger effect than external impressions; the soul must be seized by them intensely and powerfully. If a third element were not added, these perceptions would have the effect of volcanoes. This is that through a strong effort of will an inner calm and quiet can be brought about despite these impulses. Then the spiritual researcher experiences - even if only after a long time - the great moment that can be compared to the moment when a blind person suddenly regains his sight after an operation. Just as the impressions of the external world flood into the soul of the blind man after an operation, so too does everything that was previously unavailable to him. This fact makes it clear to us that there can only be a supersensible world for us if the organ of perception for it is present. When this organ is awakened, a new world opens up. We must not decide about what we do not know, but only about what we know. These organs, which are necessary for recognizing the supersensible world, are developed through meditation or concentration in the calm of our soul. Then “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” arise - to use an expression of Goethe. It could now be objected: Yes, it may be that the spiritual researcher experiences a higher world, but what do the spiritual worlds have to do with the others who cannot ascend to them? — That is not correct. The spiritual eye is necessary for recognition [of the supersensible worlds], but to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, unbiased reason is sufficient, and therefore it concerns all people. Someone in whom the higher organs are awakened can observe such a phenomenon as sleep. It is a very different state from that of waking. Only part of the human being remains in the physical world during sleep, the other part, the soul-spiritual, withdraws from the physical body when falling asleep and returns to its home, the spiritual world. The spiritual world need not be imagined as a different place; it is all around us. We have human nature, divided into two parts; during waking these are together, but during sleeping they are separated. But human nature is not yet fully explained. We can get a rough idea of the two parts that go out at night by comparing man with the animals that are closest to him of all visible creatures. We also find instincts, desires, and feelings in animals. Even if they are not present in the same perfection, they are still more or less present in animals, and only those who cannot rise to a higher [contemplation] will consider them to be the same as in humans. We need only think of something that is usually not emphasized in external science; we need only remember that, for example, in the German language there is a word that cannot be called to anyone from the outside, [the word “I”]. This name cannot sound [from the outside] to our ear when it means our own self; it must arise from one's own soul life. All true religions have recognized this. This is an announcement of what is essentially the same in man as in the divine. Correctly understood, “I” means the ineffable name of God, because Yahweh, correctly translated, means “I am,” no matter what philology may otherwise interpret. This does not mean that man is to be made a god. Just as a drop of water is not the sea, so man is not God. That which withdraws itself in the evening divides again into two parts: that which is the carrier of desires, passions, etc., and that which lets all these perceptions flow together in us and works through them - the I. Through the I, man becomes the crown of all creatures on this earth. But that which goes out at night is composed of the I and the astral body. What does a human being leave behind? The physical body, and we have that in common with every mineral. It consists of the same forces. The inanimate mineral, the crystal, takes its form from the forces within it; this is not the case with a living being. In the case of humans, we see that their physical body is subject to chemical laws only in one instance, and only at death. In death, we see what the forces imprinted on the mineral do to the body. In life, it never follows these forces. What remains in bed at night is imbued and permeated by another body, and we call this the etheric or life body. This prevents the body from following the chemical and physical laws; it is a faithful fighter against them. Now we can ask ourselves: Why does this happen every evening, that a person must return to their spiritual home, so to speak? Why must they withdraw into a spiritual world every evening? In the evening, external impressions fade; we are overcome by fatigue. When the astral body and the ego withdraw into the spiritual world, the person falls into unconsciousness. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, urges, passions and so on. Why does all this disappear from our soul life? How can it be that all this dies away at night? We shall soon understand why this is so. The astral body and the I are the bearers of pleasure and pain, of perceptions and concepts. But in order for this to become conscious to the human being, it is necessary that they are mirrored by the physical body and the etheric body. We perceive nothing but what lives in ourselves. It is like a kind of echo that is produced in us by the physical and etheric bodies. Man does not perceive directly what he feels, but what he experiences is mirrored to him through the astral body and the I, through the etheric and physical bodies. But the work of the astral body involves conjuring up what we call the soul life. The real work is done by the astral body and not by the mirror – just as it is necessary for a person to be active at a mirror in order to create this or that image. The astral body has to work from morning till evening to extract from the physical what we can call the content of our soul. The forces that the astral body needs to work during the day, it must draw from the spiritual world. When these forces are exhausted, fatigue sets in, and it must draw new forces again. Sleep has a profound significance. In the spiritual world is the source of everything we conjure up during our daily lives. If we look at our daily life in this way, we ask: What is the significance of our daily life if the soul has to draw its strength from the spiritual world? The soul and the ego do not enter the astral world empty, but take something with them from our outer world every evening. Life during the day is not without fruit for the soul's life. We need only look at what is characteristic of our soul in its deepest meaning and what is taken from our daytime life into our nighttime life. This can be seen indirectly when we look at our soul during our youth and in old age. This gives us an idea of development. In youth, we see germinal tendencies, but undeveloped, and later we see our soul transformed, with richer content. How can we transform ourselves? By the soul forming a kind of essence every evening from the external impressions we have received. We carry our daytime experiences into the night, and in the morning that which was the soul's spiritual experience has entered the soul; it joins what is already there, and in this way the soul develops. You only have to look at people who cannot sleep, and if you are an attentive observer, you will notice how the soul's progress suffers when it cannot get the right amount of sleep. We can only imprint something on our memory if we have had a proper amount of sleep. Only in this way can we develop the forces that lead us ever higher. We imprint in our soul what the world reveals to us during our waking life, and in this way our soul becomes wiser. Knowledge is an important means of developing our soul between birth and death. But let us now ask ourselves how much transformation we can actually achieve. How narrow are the limits within which we find ourselves? We can increase our soul development. We can see this in individual abilities, for example in learning to write. Writing encompasses a whole group of abilities. When we look back, we see what a wide range of abilities were involved, how much work and effort and so on went into learning the art of writing. Or think of the first attempt we made to draw the first letter, of everything that then flowed together into the one skill of writing. From what we experienced then, we extracted an essence, and through such weaving together a soul skill arises. Whatever has a deeper impact on our lives can only develop within very narrow limits in the time between birth and death. If someone pursues the riddles of the world or has gone through this or that life experience in deep pain, you can even see that reflected in their physiognomy and in their movements. From decade to decade, this is expressed more and more, even in the body. But we can develop in this direction only to a limited extent. Why? Because we have our souls before us like a malleable material, but we cannot work with what our inclinations have created between birth and death into the body, no matter how many experiences we have gathered. Let us take the example of music. If we do not have a finer ear, if we are not musical, we are unable to develop the ability during our lifetime that could change our physicality in this respect between birth and death. We are powerful in the face of the soul, but powerless in the face of the facts of our physicality. But we know that when we face the external world and conjure up all these images, they are born out of our soul - not only, but through its activity, because it could never conjure up such reflections if something were not given from outside. And this outside includes the same forces that make up our physical body. It seems so mysterious to us because we cannot penetrate there. We would have to conjure up a fine musical ear and so on from the same world. It is something like a veil, like a shell. But behind it is something that, if we could master it, would give us the ability to transform our physical body just as much as the astral. We can gain knowledge, but we cannot utilize it; we cannot transform our body with the knowledge. But there is a possibility to transform our physical body in the same way as the astral one. Even if we recognize the forces, we could not apply them directly, because our physical and etheric bodies are given to us as dense material. Here we want to refer to a law that will be incorporated into modern spiritual life through Theosophy. In the 17th century, not only laymen but also naturalists believed that worms and fish could arise from mud. If we go back to the 17th century, we find scholarly works that describe how wild animals grew out of other animals – for example, hornets out of a dead ox that had been beaten until it was brittle, bees out of a horse carcass, and wasps out of a donkey carcass. It was [the naturalist] Francesco Redi who first uttered the sentence: Living things can only arise from living things. There must be a germ of something living in order for something living to arise. Redi was almost burned [as a heretic] for saying this. Today, anyone who claims otherwise would be considered backward. Spiritual science says: Spiritual-soul things can only arise from spiritual-soul things. Just as an earthworm does not come from mud, so the spiritual does not come from the inheritance of the father and mother. We have to distinguish between the environment of the spiritual and the spiritual itself. In spiritual science, this leads us to the law of reincarnation [of what lives spiritually in man]. Today those who have recognized this law are perhaps not exactly called heretics – fashions change. Today the [true] enlightened are declared to be fantasists, dreamers. But in the not too distant future, people will no longer be able to understand how anyone could have believed otherwise. Thus, we see in what comes into existence through birth the repetition of an earlier earthly existence. And what lies between death and birth is a purely spiritual existence. When we look at a child with undeveloped features, we see what it has brought with it from previous lives on earth, and we can understand something that is very important. Why can we only develop mental abilities during our lifetime? When we wake up, we find the same body with the same organs. But when a person passes through the gate of death, the great moment arrives when he discards his physical body and only what is spiritual and mental remains. Now he is no longer bound to the body. The conditions are quite different than during sleep. In the morning, when we wake up, we find the same physical body; we cannot destroy it and rebuild it. But when the physical falls away at death, what we have taken in knowledge during our life is united with our soul. In accordance with the knowledge and experiences we have had, we can now reshape them and incorporate them into a new body. Thus, in each life, we build our body according to what we have gained in the last life; we make it the product of our experiences in the last life. Life experience in the present life is our existence in a next life. This is how knowledge works in us; it is one of the most important forces of existence, shaping itself. We are grateful for the knowledge of the last life; it has produced a body in the present life and preserves that with which we have enriched ourselves in the present life, and that will bring us higher in the next life. Now we also understand why there can be a huge difference between different people when we consider the strength and weakness of their cognitive abilities. Now you will ask: why does man not remember his previous lives? That is also a matter of development. A four-year-old child cannot count. But it would be a false conclusion to say that this is not a human being, because humans can count. Wait until he is ten years old. There comes a time for every person when he begins to remember. One can only remember that which is present. Fichte was right to say that most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than a self. The realization of what the self is is still missing. Just as the flowers can only be recognized through sensory impressions, so can the spiritual only be recognized through spiritual research. From the intimate study of the self, it follows that the self must be there as a conscious idea before one can remember. Only when we have generated the idea of self can we reflect back on ourselves. Thus, knowledge as self-knowledge leads us to build up our memory in such a way that we consciously expand life beyond the life that is enclosed between birth and death. If we can continue to work from life to life, if through knowledge we succeed in shaping ourselves and thus awaken the eternal in us, then the knowledge of development helps us in the shaping of all that is eternal in us. Now we give the work of knowledge and its meaning for our whole life. It brings us immortality and gives us knowledge of our immortality. Immortality and knowledge belong together. In a particular life, our body appears to be something that has been worked into it from the previous life. We often cannot use the knowledge in this life, but we need it to build a new body. This certainty gives spiritual science a practical meaning in life. It must not remain mere theory, but we must permeate ourselves with it completely. We then see death in a new light. Knowledge has built up our present body. Through the disintegration of our body, we become free from it and gain the opportunity to build a new one. Thus, even if we look at death in pain when it touches others, or with fear when it approaches us, it appears to us in a completely different form. If we can rise to a higher point of view, we can say that we are grateful for death, because it gives us the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves - for a higher life. The old spiritual researchers have always recognized this and also said so. Goethe puts it so beautifully in front of our soul, how we bring in from fresh life what we have worked for in the previous life: As on the day when you were given to the world |
67. The Eternal human Soul: The Supersensible Human Being
18 Apr 1918, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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While you dwell on the thing, you discover: what you bring up as memory is, actually, subconscious knowledge, a deeper level of consciousness in which our usual ego does not live. However, this consciousness penetrates the force of growth. |
In our usual consciousness, we perceive the physical corporeality. This subconsciousness perceives this corporeality in us. |
Our corporeality stimulates our ego in the usual consciousness from without. We collide in the usual consciousness with our body; this stimulates our ego-idea. |
67. The Eternal human Soul: The Supersensible Human Being
18 Apr 1918, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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Because one has to consider the supersensible human being as the core of the human being, it is quite natural that the knowledge of the supersensible human being is human self-knowledge. However, with this human self-knowledge you face a very strange paradox. On the one side, you face the necessity of understanding the human being as a supersensible being; on the other side, any usual cognitive ability is bound to the sensory appearance. What he grasps with his reason is also bound to the sensory appearance. One could say without thinking, self-knowledge demands the view of the human being with cognitive abilities that are far away from his consciousness at first. In so far as the human being becomes aware of himself as a supersensible being, he has to acknowledge in a certain sense that everything that he performs in life arises from his supersensible being. On the other side, one could say, everything that appears in his consciousness appears sensorily “veiled” in a somewhat improper sense. Hence, one misunderstands spiritual-scientific research and speaking about the supersensible so easily and so often. Since the today's considerations will show that one cannot approach the true nature of the human being with the usual abilities of the everyday consciousness. Yes, one has even to say that that kind of knowledge which has developed so greatly on scientific basis rather misleads concerning the self-knowledge than to lead this self-knowledge in the right way. Since just if the well-schooled scientific way of thinking approaches the human self-knowledge, one notices that it can fail too easily. We want to take an example as starting point. In the very interesting booklet The Subconscious Self and Its Relation to Education and Health by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915) is talk of various things that also strike the scientist if he gets to know the human life in its development in the different relations. We have spoken in a former talk about the revelations of the unconscious, of the subconscious. The example that I want to bring in is that of a naturalist, and the way in which he speaks about that is completely scientific. The author of this booklet wants to point to a certain place how this subconscious being plays a peculiar, vague role. Waldstein chooses the following example. He says, I stood before the shop-window of a bookstore. Because I am a naturalist, I just looked at a book about mollusks. At this moment when I saw this book, I started smiling to myself, and I was surprised why I did this, because a book about mollusks has nothing humorous.—He continues: I closed my eyes to investigate what maybe proceeded in my surroundings. When I turned the view away from the book, I heard the tones of a barrel organ quite soft in the distance. It played the melody of a song that one played when I danced my first quadrille. At that time, I did not care with which sympathies or antipathies I met this melody; since I was occupied very much to make my dance steps well arranged. At that time, I was not at all especially careful on what entered half my consciousness musically. Still the fact that I must smile standing before the book about mollusks after decades proves that the impression, which at that time that melody had done still, has continuing effects; and if I had not closed my eyes, but had been content with the astonishment, I would not have known then why I smiled standing before the book. One realises how mysteriously such things have continuing effects in the subsoil of the soul life, how much generally exists in the human being that comes up only quite fantastically in the consciousness; one realises how difficult it is to get to real self-knowledge. Since to which danger do you expose yourself, if you want to practise introspection? To the danger that you have to deal with all possible completely blurred subconscious things which you have maybe taken up decades ago which have a lasting effect which work only in the deepest subsoil of the soul like a mood that comes up then and nuances what you now observe in yourself. Waldstein and others bring in numerous such examples. You find those also in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Such examples are very suitable to be rather careful about introspection. Since even some people believe to get with introspection also to a real knowledge of the human being. Some people also believe while bringing up such memories from their subconsciousness that they do all possible clairvoyant discoveries. Now one has to be careful also in another respect. You can realise, for example, that some who claim to figure this or that out by their supersensible knowledge of their inside express this supersensible knowledge in pictures which are got, for example, from telegraphs or railways or as the case may be. From it, one would see that the supersensible with its pictures had just to wait to appear, until the railways were invented. Someone who does not approach the supersensible research uncritically will also be able to know easily how frivolously one proceeds in this field now and again, and how it is really soothing that thorough scientific thinking points to the fact that such contents which somebody regards as revelation of higher worlds sometimes are nothing but what the person concerned has taken up once in any blurred way at a younger age
In my book I have pointed out that, actually, everything works on the human being and that sometimes in something that the one regards as an inspiration is nothing but the transformation of a shop sign at which he did not properly look when passing by in the street, but which penetrated only into his subconscious. With it, one points to an area of human life that one has to consider rather carefully and rather critically just by somebody who seriously wants to expand his research to the supersensible world. However, on the other side, all these memories, these subconscious images point to something else, it is as it were the side effect of something quite different. There I have to return more exactly to something that I have already mentioned here in the course of these talks: the relation between memory and the usual mental pictures. A very usual kind of thinking that has played a big role also in science, in particular in psychology, is that the human being has experiences while facing the outside world. These experiences evoke mental pictures in him. Now he has these mental pictures. After some time he “remembers.” Now one imagines this process very often in such a way, as if these mental pictures, which he had once and which he has somewhere in the subsoil of the soul, come up again as recollections in his consciousness. One thinks very often, more or less consciously or subconsciously, that that which appears in the recollection is nothing but the same mental picture which one had once, and which was down there anyhow and comes up again in the consciousness. However, someone who knows to practise real observation in this field has to regard this way of thinking as something rather childish and dilettantish. Since if we face an outer phenomenon if we have an experience of the smallest or biggest kind, which evokes perception and mental pictures by the perception in us, this “activity”—I want to call it provisionally so—is accompanied by another activity of which we do not become aware usually. This activity is yet another one; it accompanies the conscious imagining activity and causes something in us that leads to memory. However, you have to observe properly. The most trivial observation in this area is that if you consider the difference of imagining, which can be completely easy, and memorising. Remember only what the young people who have to “cram” for an exam have to do, so that they have not only the mental picture, but also keep it in mind. There quite weird performances are carried out sometimes. Think of the play, which takes place between the human hands and the head if anybody has to cram something. Of course, that is only an outer sign of what I mean. But in truth it is in such a way that during the imagining activity another activity is still there which does not get to our consciousness and exercises an effect on our organism which consists of something quite different than of forming mental pictures. Later if we remember that again which we have imagined once, this mental picture completely originates anew. It originates as it were from the “sign,” from the “engram”—if I am allowed to use this expression—which that activity can exercise which accompanies the imagining activity on our organism. As we face the object of the outside world and form, inwards directed, our mental picture, we face our organs while remembering. What happens there what is different from our imagining as the outer object is different from our mental picture is changed into the mental picture anew. Somebody who is able to observe the organisation of the human mind and its effectiveness knows that that which forms as a mental picture appears and disappears, while it is imagined. If anything is reminded, the mental picture has not slept down there and appears again, but from something quite different that happens below in the organism the mental picture is anew formed. What I want to show there is that we have to see something in that accompanying activity, which goes along with it, actually, in the subsoil of our conscious life and is connected with something that always emerges with the memories from our subconscious. As well as everything that appears in the world has its concomitants which appear like the caricature of the real now and again, is that which I have mentioned from the writing by Waldstein also such a concomitant of the quite normal regular way how the human being works in the memories. I would like to say, what proceeds subconsciously, so that the human being has a memory, appears in such things if it overflows or if anything remains indistinct or blurred like the sounds of a barrel organ that still generate an effect making Waldstein smile. That which is there rather conceals the things than that it explains them. Since the point is that it is a very normal activity, which is very necessary for the human being, namely that which forms the basis of the human memory. This is something that accompanies our whole conscious life perpetually, but we do not turn our attention upon this accompanying activity in the usual life. The accompanying activity is due to our organisation. It is a kind of touchstone of the real supersensible research to consider such a thing like this accompanying activity forming memory. Since that which normally works in the subconscious can be changed into something conscious on the first level at first. Changing something unconscious into something conscious is one of the capacities that lead to the real investigation of the supersensible. What remains usually subconscious must be brought up in the consciousness. Thereby it already becomes different. The exercises, which I have described in my book, which one has to go through to put the soul in such a condition that it can face the supersensible, consist of many things. However, one can illustrate something elementary showing that this first elementary is related to a quite normal activity which remains, however, usually subconscious. One has to carry out the activity consciously which is carried out there unconsciously, but quite normally to form the memory. For that, it is necessary that you are able to refrain from that activity which causes the usual mental pictures bound to the senses. You must be able to withdraw as it were from this imagining. However, you are not able to do this if you cannot replace it with another kind of imagining. You attain this, while you focus on self-developed mental pictures that are easily understandable. I say "easily understandable" mental pictures; this is exceptionally important. Self-chosen, self-developed, easily understandable mental pictures must be because just any subconscious, everything about which one cannot know to which blurred perception it is due must be removed. However, you never are sure—one sees this from this example—that this blurred, subconscious weaving of the soul life is blanked out if you do not focus on a mental picture which you can really figure out at the moment where you yourself have formed it, so that you know, any part of this mental picture has arisen from your immediate will which you have unfolded at this moment. “Self-chosen” does not mean of course “self-made;” you can get such mental pictures from an experienced spiritual researcher, and he is able to know best of all how they can be adapted to the individuality of the human being concerned. However, it matters that you intermingle the mental picture with the thoughts and experience in the soul that you have nothing in the soul but this mental picture. It also matters that these mental pictures occupy our consciousness if possible in very versatile way so that this mental picture is present in every atom, I would like to say. This is particularly fulfilled if you take such mental pictures in your consciousness that stimulate you to make the thoughts versatile. A growing plant, for example, is a good mental picture; not staring at something resting, but at something that is in motion or that has any relations to each other. Thereby we are protected that our consciousness becomes idle while staring at the mental picture. Since it matters for the investigation of the supersensible world that everything that is done as preparation has to be done completely consciously from start to finish that in no way the consciousness is anyhow darkened. Hence, it belongs to the first requirements of the future spiritual researcher that he eliminates everything from that soul activity which should lead him to spiritual research—of course, not from the remaining life—that can decrease the consciousness anyhow. It is particularly important that in this living in easily understandable mental pictures, in this “meditating,” nothing prevails in the consciousness that may darken it. It is the first requirement that anything dreamy, all thoughts, arising from the inside, which one likes, are eliminated from the preparations of spiritual-scientific research. Furthermore, everything has to disappear that could anyhow darken the consciousness of percipience. What you want to aim at must not deal anyhow, for example, with staring a luminous point by which one could get to a certain hypnotic condition, or with that which some people even feel as a rather nice preparation: looking at a “crystal ball” and the like. The opposite of all suggestive or hypnotic conditions you have to exercise if you prepare yourself for spiritual research. You can learn from that: if you often hear from people who are also “followers” of spiritual science and say that you have to lose yourself if possible eliminating the own being to a dreamy “devotion,” then it is that “spiritual science” which may cause a lot of ease which does not at all lead, however, to the investigation of the supersensible world. I have to draw attention sometimes to such things; since even people who want to be serious critics of spiritual research confuse it with its opposite. Even a critic (Max Dessoir, 1867-1947, German philosopher) who has made a great stir confuses this spiritual research with its opposite, and he describes them in Beyond the Soul (1917), with those phenomena which belong by no means to the spiritual world according to the methods of spiritual research. However, it is strange that just this critic brings in an example of his own soul life that he continued speaking for a while when he held a lecture and then only realised that he had continued speaking without his thoughts having gone along. You can be quite sure that such a lecturer has not understood any trace of that which I mean here with spiritual research. Of course, you have to develop that further what I have given now, but it matters to emphasise the essentials. The essentials and important of that what you experience internally this way is the following: While you evoke such mental pictures more and more in your soul and mind how the soul is active different than with the outer percipience, the big, important fact manifests itself to you from a certain point on that you are now inside such a soul activity which remains usually unaware and leads in the usual life to the formation of memory. You have pushed one level down as it were what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining. You have not considered what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining, and you have considered what accompanies this imagining else. You have pushed your whole ego-consciousness one level down where, otherwise, this is done what leads to memory, and you get to know this way what takes place usually perpetually below in the soul what you do not consider in the usual consciousness. I have repeatedly shown also here what the fact depends on that the human being is able to form memories. Everybody knows what it means to the human being if his memory power is disturbed pathologically for a time. You get to know a level of soul experience which represents something subconscious to the usual life, and which still cannot be denied, because it is there in its effects which, however, is a particular experience if you settle in that which you have woken by meditating. This experience is a shaking one for someone who generally has a feeling of such things. You experience that you have reached that level where memory lives that you have approached something in your being that proceeds, otherwise, rather unconsciously that normally never enters even approximately in your consciousness by its nature. This memory-forming force is related to the formative force in us in a way. Since while the force of growth is far away from the usual imagining, it is near by the memory-forming force. Always something immediately grows together that is, otherwise, separated: the force of growth and the memory-forming force to a compound thing which you have in yourself and which you get to know this way. We carry this perpetually in ourselves. The usual consciousness does not suspect at all that the same force which accompanies the human being as force of growth, as formative force is—increased and refined—the same to which you appeal if you form memories. However, it is something compound. If you get to know the thing, it presents itself as something compound. Since you learn to distinguish that which is combined as force of growth and as memory-forming force; it is as it were a duality that co-operates as a unity. While you dwell on the thing, you discover: what you bring up as memory is, actually, subconscious knowledge, a deeper level of consciousness in which our usual ego does not live. However, this consciousness penetrates the force of growth. The force of growth and the memory-forming force face each other closer than our conscious knowledge and the outer physical world. However, our conscious knowledge of the outer physical world is more distant from each other; we cannot build the bridge from the one to the other. That which we want to get from there, which we bring to mind by meditations, carries its own object in itself, but it is something that is related to our knowledge. We learn to figure a duality out. However, this duality appears, the further you advance in your soul life, very clear to the beholding consciousness. You behold the force of growth this way. You behold it—to use a good old quotation of Troxler (Ignaz Paul Vital T., 1780-1866, Swiss physician and philosopher)—as the true human corporeality compared with the physical corporeality. In our usual consciousness, we perceive the physical corporeality. This subconsciousness perceives this corporeality in us. Do not misunderstand me, I have called this corporeality the body of formative forces in the magazine Das Reich. I called it the “etheric body” previously. Because certain people take exception to expressions, I have tried to come closer with the term to that which it concerns and I have called that which is closest to the physical body and accompanies our whole life as formative- forces the “body of formative forces.” One can call that which does not live in our usual consciousness which is always closer to this body of formative forces, and to which one gets by meditation the “astral body” for certain reasons; but one can also call it the “soul,” which works a level deeper than the usual consciousness. As the chemist separates a compound substance into the different elements, or as the physicist splits the white sunlight into different colours, we have the nature of the human being divided into the physical body that one perceives with the outer senses, into the body of formative forces that is the first supersensible member of the human being, and into the astral body or soul that subconsciously knows about the work of the body of formative forces, but shines in the usual consciousness only in the memory pictures . From all that the real ego is separated which swims on this triple human being, which knows nothing about that which the soul knows about the bodily, which separates, however, from the soul and which then forms the usual consciousness, and which is spiritual. The fact that this ego-being must be separated as a particular member from the other members turns out only if you advance further with the recommended exercises. I have described how one puts self-formed, clear mental pictures into the soul. It is advantageous if one takes versatile mental pictures and tries to feel, to experience what can be just experienced resting in such mental pictures. These are two things. The one is that you become aware that there is such a weaving and living in the human being as it is similar to the memory formation. The other is what you experience if you look internally at this experience. It is as if you proceed in such a way that you form the mental pictures on one side, the thinking on the other side, which becomes memory then. This is a particular experience. Someone who goes through it who trains himself as spiritual researcher in the real sense knows that this is a particular experience. Since an element stops from a certain moment on prevailing in this soul life, which, otherwise, is significant always for our soul life: the spatial element. If you reflect that in the usual consciousness almost only spatial images are available, then you realise how much the usual consciousness is dependent on space. This experience, which attaches itself to such mental pictures, as I have developed, causes gradually to know yourself lifted out of space and being in only temporal processes. This is like a significant progress of the human soul life: to know yourself in the tides of time, because this causes to figure the stream of time out really. I said, the whole results in recognising the relationship of the memory power with the forces of growth. You are put just in this. Something else is still important. I said, it is a double: to have these mental pictures—and to pay particular attention on what you experience there, how you really experience the mental pictures becoming versatile, the living in time, since then you are with your ego in this imagining life. You are not only in an imagining life, but also generally in a life, which is mixed with the real forces working in time. Then you have got at an ego-experience that is completely different from the usual ego-experience. Someone who knows the usual ego-experience by appropriate introspection knows how narrowly it is bound to the human corporeality, and I have described last time to which elements of the corporeality the ego is bound at first: that it concerns equilibrium relationships, so spatial relations. However, you cannot stay at this experience, but you properly get into the course of time. Very few people regard anyhow what I have indicated now. Thus, some philosophers assume that our ego is that ego which remains in any experience from birth to death. However, this weird concept of the permanent usual ego as Bergson (Henri B., 1850-1941) designed it can be easily disproved. Every dreamless sleep disproves this assertion. This is why one is not able to build up something on the usual ego-experience if one wants to recognise the human being. However, one carries the ego--experience into the course of time. If one carries the ego into the course of time if to the other experience of the mental subconscious and the memory-forming body this new ego-experience appears, then it does not count any more that every sleep interrupts this ego-experience, but then something else counts. Then turns out that with our ego-idea also the following is associated. I have shown last time from which vague feeling this ego-idea appears. It has to be inspired as it were. It is not there in the dreamless sleep. How is it inspired? It is inspired when we approach our corporeality with our soul again. Our corporeality stimulates our ego in the usual consciousness from without. We collide in the usual consciousness with our body; this stimulates our ego-idea. This ego-idea must not be considered as something permanent. However, with that which I have portrayed as new ego-experience the situation is quite different. This lives in the tides of time, it is lifted out from space. This is just inspired, while the human being inspires the experience at one moment in time and not with the spatial collision with his corporeality, but in the collision with the experience of another moment in time. This ego-experience about which I have spoken now is identical with the fact that if I wake I collide in mysterious way with that moment in time at which I have fallen asleep. This forms the basis of the new ego-experience that we experience ourselves at different, at consecutive moments in time that we bridge the time, even if it is discontinuous if sleep disturbs it. These are the essentials of this ego-experience. Because we immerse the ego in the soul, as far as this is related with the conditions of growth, thereby we immerse the ego itself in the conditions of growth. We advance to that in the ego, which accompanies us from birth to death; we penetrate into the continual stream of ego-experience. What philosophy only concludes else about which one only judges, this is experienced. One defends himself even against the fact that Eduard von Hartmann talks of the fact that if one wants to observe a feeling it is disturbed and changes. If Eduard von Hartmann notices this, he just wants to exclude that the ego can live in this stream of time. He wants to prove just with it that for the ego-experience the stream of time gets lost to him. However, it does not get lost, but is just gained with it. Yes, someone who can practise introspection spiritual-scientifically knows that the ego-experience that is there at this moment interrelates with former moments in time. Do not take it as tomfoolery or as boast, if I tell an own experience which seems to be very simple if it is experienced which shook me again recently. I finished a book in 1894 in which I pointed out wholly philosophically that the human thinking is already something spiritual: my Philosophy of Freedom. At that time, I was a young man of 33 years. Now recently the necessity has arisen to work through this book again, to go through everything again that penetrated my soul at that time and to observe at the same time how the ego-experiences of today relate to the quite same ego--experiences of those days. If you succeed in realising how something similar appears in time while experiencing again and encountering the revived experiences as usually at awakening, then you can just realise with such an example how the ego is inspired exactly the same way as in the corporeality at awakening, while it meets something of it again that existed in the stream of time. Someone who cannot observe this does not imagine at all what he experiences if he does not have the ego in the stream of space, but if he is forced to think it according to the mental pictures in the Philosophy of Freedom that many people regard as “abstractions.” I call them the most concrete, most living mental pictures because the Philosophy of Freedom develops nothing but living concepts. This is the ego-experience due to the interrelation of the one moment in time with the other moment in time. There begins that what you can pictorially call the transition to the inner musical experience of the world. It is, as if you interrelate a tone of a melody to the other tones of the melody if not only this originates that the tone shakes the air as it were, experiences itself in space, but if a tone interrelates with the other tone. It is impossible actually to look different at the inner weaving and living of this highest member of the human being from to proceed to such a musical experience of the one moment of time through the other. The whole human being is thereby divided into (1) the physical body, (2) the body of formative forces working in the memory, which spiritualises the body of formative forces like a subconscious knowledge, (3) the actual soul or astral body, and (4) the ego. Then we have tried to look at the supersensible, and with it you have the complete human being. With it, you also have the suggestion how you have to experience, so that you can directly behold the permanent in the human being. There is no interpretation or philosophical analysis of the usual ego useful; you have to carry this ego into another sphere, you have to experience it anew on quite different conditions. That ego which you experience this way is an ego that is independent from the spatial corporeality at the same time, and it can gradually perceive, while you continue your exercises, that in the tides of time which lives in the human being only temporally, not spatially. If I am allowed to insert something for those who know of such things: one has pointed out in the present philosophy that one does not approach the soul if one wants to grasp it substantially, but only if one grasps it as a passage through a process. In particular, Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, German psychologist and philosopher) pointed to that. However, Wundt pointed to the fact abstractly that one does not approach the soul if one considers it as a substance, but that one has to observe it in the living process. However, it does not concern to visualise it only in the mental process by abstractions but to submerge with the own ego in the mental process and to experience it. Then one can gradually pursue this mental process also beyond those times in which it is busy in the spatial-physical. If you have learnt to let collide the experience of one moment in time with the other moment, then you can also gradually develop the ability in yourself to let collide the inner experience of the ego generally with the stream of time where the spatial-bodily-has only originated in the stream of heredity. Then the stream of time extends beyond the spatial-bodily, then you behold in the stream of time in which the ego weaves in the life before birth and in the life after death. To somebody who experiences that which I have described now in principle something occurs internally that one can compare with the experience, which probably Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) might have had when he stood at the beginning of the modern scientific way of thinking and asserted this. The human beings up to Giordano Bruno looked at the cosmic space, saw the blue firmament and regarded it as a real border of space. It was significant that in Giordano Bruno's soul the idea appeared first: there is really nothing at all; only our view, only the conditions of our sense perception cause that we see a blue bowl there; in truth it extends to infinity, the blue firmament is only a border of our view. This also applies to the temporal. Birth or conception and death become the borders of the temporal firmament at which we look which our sense. What we regard as our world in which we live with our ego, with our supersensible human being, this is beyond this temporal firmament beyond death on one side, beyond birth or conception on the other side. Today we face this great leap forward of the human knowledge where in similar way as centuries ago the spatial illusion was removed the illusion is now removed that birth and death are borders beyond which one cannot get. You have to do this leap. Then it opens the view of the real life of your supersensible being. However, you have to consider particularly: someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher as I have described here has to pursue with the highest critical introspection always what could keep him from coming objectively into this spiritual world. He can be very easily kept from it. It is advantageous not to use mental pictures for meditation, which evoke feelings and emotions. Somebody who uses mental pictures, which excite him very strongly, can deceive himself very easily. Hence, you should avoid for the preparation that religious impulses are brought in the exercises. Strange to say—it will be fine with some people—those mental pictures are the very best which touch us the least concerning our emotional life. If you become engrossed in geometry in such versatile mental pictures where the figures can accept different forms, or in such mental pictures, as I have shown them in the Philosophy of Freedom, then that furthers us in this field. With it, I do not want to say that spiritual-scientific research is not concerned with the religious life. However, it concerns that one gets to that religious internalization and deepening for which just spiritual science can also be the preparation best of all because one does not take it as starting point, but proceeds with very unemotional and incurious mental pictures on the way of research, and if you are in the spiritual world, the view which can already be a mighty help just for the religious deepening comes to you from this spiritual world. Thus, you have to use particular mental pictures, which are not associated with the griefs and concerns of human life and which you can easily understand. However, these never are the mental pictures, which excite us easily, because there everything imaginable appears from the subconscious in the soul. One has to exclude this subconscious above all. You really penetrate into a spiritual experience this way where you can find that being in the human being only which lives in the freedom of will which lives in the immortal soul being. Every human being bears it in himself. However, you can recognise it only in such ways as I have described. In the next talk, I want to go on talking from this point about the important questions of the human soul life: about the freedom of will and about the immortality of the soul. I want to show how one advances from the supersensible human being to a real conception of the life of this supersensible human being, of the life in the real perpetuity, and the life in the freedom of will. People have argued so much about freedom of will and immortality because one did not want to get involved with creating the necessary preparations first to enter the field of human experience which you have to enter if you want to gain a view of that from which only freedom of will originates, and in which only that rests which goes through births and deaths in the human being. You have to recognise first how in the human life the temporal runs during this life on earth. Then you also find the ways to get beyond this life on earth. Such research can become fertile for the most important, most practical fields of life, for example, for education. One does not at all consider this field from the temporal experience of the soul, although one wants to make modern ideas fertile for it today. Someone who can look from one time of human experience to another finds a metamorphosing life in the soul life. He finds, for example: if he has grown old and looks back at former times and then at more distant times, and if he looks not only outwardly, but experiences it internally, then he notices how the inner mental object changes what originates from an object of the soul life at a moment in time. One notices: what works in the childhood mainly as will what is expressed as wish works in the later life in the experience of life, works in the thinking. What we have later as fifty years old humans as experience of life is a transformed will life of our childhood. As the petal of the plant is a transformed green leaf in the sense of the Goethean metamorphosis outwardly, but as the leaf does not remain green, but becomes red with the rose, that changes which is wish with the child into experiences of life in the later age. And vice versa: what the child thinks changes into willpower in the later life. If you know this coherence, you can imagine how you can work on the child! If you fulfil every senseless wish of a child and induce it that it atomises its will in all directions, then you make it relatively idiotic early in later age because the atomised will cannot change into experience of life which expresses itself in a quiet life of thought later.—This metamorphosis of the inner life manifests itself to spiritual beholding as usually spatial relations manifest themselves. One also learns to recognise that one has to try to lead the thoughts of the child, so that it does not become a limp, weak human being later, but takes up such mental pictures that lead to a certain willpower. Someone who possibly believes that by suggestion of the will the will, and by suggestion of the life of thought the thoughts are strengthened is on a quite wrong track; he does not know the weaving and living of the supersensible human being. Here is a point—and we could bring in countless ones—where real penetrating into the reality of existence leads immediately to life praxis. Somebody who wants to stop at the outer reality resembles a person who has a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron before himself and says about it, this is a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. However, another says to him, this is a magnet. The former means, I see nothing of it, I see a horseshoe only, and I want to shoe my horse with it.—He does not see the magnet. What can the other do who can add the invisible to reality! Thus, the world is interspersed with something invisible. However, everywhere reality is fulfilled with a stream of existence that one only recognises if one gets a relation of the supersensible in the human being to the supersensible in the surrounding existence. The fact that many things make a particularly unreal impression in our time is due to the fact that the human beings believe to face the stream of reality immediately. This should be “a scientific view.” However, they do not realise what lives in the depths of reality. Hence, they cannot acknowledge that which weaves in the human life as something real. Someone who has a recognising sense for that which goes forward in the present who can compare subtler, more intimate events to the catastrophic events which have now become the human misfortune is reminded very much of how necessary it is just in our time that understanding of the supersensible relation of the human being to the world gains ground again in humanity. If you ask yourself how it has happened, actually, that this understanding is not there, then you can characterise it in the following way. It is not there. Today people are regarded as especially clever, and those who are far away from reality are clever in certain respect. I can call a book in which, actually, from start to finish no tone of reality is included, and which contains the knowledge of the whole world, nevertheless, strictly speaking from its point of view, because it is a dictionary, a philosophical one: that by Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923, German author) which is an idol of knowledge not so much of the experts but of numerous laymen or—if I am not allowed to say this—“journalists.” However, someone who approaches this book with sense of reality can get a peculiar feeling. Start reading any article, read it to the end: you have turned around in a circle. It is, as if you have looked at something that blinded you; then you turn around and look again. However, you get to nothing at all. You ask yourself with every article why it is written, actually? It is to everybody with sense of reality a torture to read this pretentious book. Nevertheless, it is a very clever book. I could praise the astuteness, the cleverness of this book; but a book has come about which reminds you with every article of the good Munchausen who wanted to pull himself out of a swamp on his own shock of hair. This book is also typical for many things that are thought in the present and are done for a long time, and what removes the human beings from reality, from the supersensible. However, in this supersensible the spiritual, the real is flowing. Why did the human being diverge from reality? Nothing can face the real Christianity and the real piety more understanding than spiritual science. However, take the reality that is often associated with the development of the last two millennia, there you get stuck into the idea: you have to search the spirit beyond outer nature, have to consider the outer nature as something that you must avoid if you want to get to the spirit. Go back to the older centuries, and you realise that one withdraws from the outer nature and her secrets; one looks for other ways and does not look for the spirit that is spread out in nature. Then natural sciences came; other necessities appeared to the human consciousness concerning the concept of nature. However, the former centuries had made sure not to see the spirit in nature; one wanted to find it apart nature. Now she faced the human beings and she was divested of spirit. Now one investigated that nature which one had divested of spirit. This takes place since four to five centuries. Because one saw everything approaching the human being from this spirit-divested nature with a certain necessity, the human being was also divested of spirit. The spirit-divested nature became the vampire of the human spirit. Nature entered in science and her facts became irrefutable. I have often said that the human beings have to admire the results of natural sciences; but nature must not be considered as spirit-divested, otherwise, it becomes the vampire, and one can no longer find what lives in the human being as spirit. Then you find what the barrel organ plays. That which the barrel organ plays is below in the organic. There one grasps the organic life only, one side of life only, not the other side that we have taken as starting point today that already has the supersensible stream in the memory. |
302. Education for Adolescents: Lecture Seven
18 Jun 1921, Stuttgart Tr. Carl Hoffmann Rudolf Steiner |
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Try to visualize this situation in Greece. The child grew up, revered a person in his or her early thirties. On reaching the age of twenty-one, the child strongly felt: “Now I have to find someone of my own age.” |
Outside, they said, “everything is blossoming, thriving, growing, and ever changing. All this is also working in me.” The activity of the Greek’s own etheric body, imagined in this way, was not beyond experience. |
No, the positive forms will come to us as though by themselves when we observe in this way. We shall arrive at a judgment of each child, need not speak about it, because it will be mobile within us. We can then raise it to consciousness, and we shall conduct our lessons according to the numerous judgments that live and surge in us, as the whole of the animal kingdom is living in true thought forms. |
302. Education for Adolescents: Lecture Seven
18 Jun 1921, Stuttgart Tr. Carl Hoffmann Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday we began with a subject I referred to as a kind of exploration of conscience that is appropriate for our time and especially necessary for the teacher of children in their fourteenth and fifteenth years. Not only ought this age that outwardly manifests in sexual maturity to be dealt with at the actual time; it ought to be kept in mind throughout the school years. Because our own education—or miseducation—was such that as a result there can be no real understanding of children, especially children in this age group, this kind of higher exploration of conscience has become essential. We can visualize this situation by proceeding as follows. Let us consider the human being between twenty-one and twentyeight years. Spiritual science speaks of the birth of the ego, the time when the ego actually comes fully into its own in life. We emphasized the fact that the ego of the girl at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year is absorbed into the astral body, is therefore not yet independent, while the girl’s astral body has already attained a certain independence at this age. The ego of the boy, we said, is not absorbed into the astral body; it leads a kind of withdrawn life. And I explained that both these tendencies, these characteristics, can indeed be seen as the result of the inner human development. But when the I, the ego, fully comes into its own at about the twenty-first year, this shows itself in one human being looking for and finding others, and this in the fullest sense of the word: other human beings. This is such a specific characteristic of this age. When, let’s say, a twenty-four-year-old finds a twenty-one-year-old—but not younger than twentyone or older than twenty-eight—the two will be in an equal, reciprocal relationship in all areas: spirit, soul, body. During this age, we really interact with, relate to others in this age group as equals. This observation is of special significance for anyone who wishes to be involved in education. All the psychological fiddle- faddle that is frequently practiced is a mere playing with clever words. If we today wish to understand life, we have to observe such things as this special nuance that is present in human beings when they meet one another between their twenty-first and twenty-eighth years. Let us now consider other age groups: a youth between the age of fourteen and twenty-one and someone between twentyeight and thirty-five. Regardless of their sexes, it will not be possible for them to relate fully as equals. And yet, provided certain conditions we shall presently discuss are met, a significant relationship can be established between them. If a youth aged fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen meets a twenty-eight-, twentynine-, or thirty-year-old person, the matter is as follows. Engendered by the astral body, the physical development between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, the characteristic outer behavior, the improving skills, the ideals, the way the young find their way into outer life—this is subject to unconsciousness, just as the physical life proceeds unconsciously when developing to the outside. The same development emerges as a soul form in the inner life of those between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. This is the reason why persons in this age group are especially predestined for understanding, for feeling, the processes taking place in adolescents. And adolescents are especially suited to look up to people between the ages of twenty-eight and thirtyfive, because they can see inwardly active in those between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five what is in themselves more or less unconsciously manifesting physically in connection to the world outside. The knowledge of the connection between these age groups was still very much present in ancient Greece. It was instinctively experienced. When Greek children looked up to the older ones they felt instinctively, not fully consciously: “They have in their souls what we have in our bodies; we see something coming to us from them in a refined way, what we have in our physical bodies.” And the twenty-eight or twenty-nine-year- old Greeks took immense pleasure in what they saw developing and manifesting in the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen- year-olds. There was this real relation between age groups, this instinctive life—not as in our culture, where people only relate in an abstract way—in which one was important for the other person by virtue of one’s age. The Greeks still experienced this instinctive relationship in an extraordinarily strong way, and it really affected their social life. Try to visualize this situation in Greece. The child grew up, revered a person in his or her early thirties. On reaching the age of twenty-one, the child strongly felt: “Now I have to find someone of my own age.” This resulted in a manifoldness and also an inwardness. It also gave the social life a certain structure. We must emphasize this point especially today, when this instinctive life is no longer present in human beings, when especially the teachers of adolescents do not know what to do with them. We cannot find answers to this problem because—as I said yesterday—we were not given such ideas and concepts that could affect our feelings to the extent that the instincts we lost during the natural course of evolution could in a more conscious way be revived. Without our preoccupation with anthroposophical spiritual science, by which such feelings, such refined feelings, can again be stimulated, we would gradually produce even deeper gulfs between the older children and ourselves. All we could then do is to command, to order them, to do this or that. Should we fail in this we could have recourse to the police or some other authority who would then threaten the disobedient. We cannot establish an inner relationship between teachers and students unless—however theoretical this may sound—we stimulate such thoughts in our whole being that can again awaken in us, but now consciously, what the instinctive life used to provide for people in the past. Because of this difference in world conception, as I told you yesterday, what we are learning today about our world—that the different substances and properties in nature are combinations of some one hundred or so elements—is valid for us only after death, for our corpses in their graves. The chemical and physical interactions concern not the living human being but only the corpse, which disintegrates according to the laws we find in the combinations of these elements. By contrast we can point to the views held especially by the ancient Greeks, and still by people as late as the fourth century—views that are today dismissed as childish, as I said yesterday. But these views, correctly understood, provided the people with something else: the way they regarded the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. As I pointed out, they did not regard the four elements as pictures of coarse sense impressions, coarse physical matter; they regarded them qualitatively. Fire contained at the same time the qualities warm and dry; they thought of water as cold and damp. These living concepts that they connected to the elements could then be applied in several ways. They applied them in the way they thought about their connection to earth, air, fire, and water—in which they saw pictures, quite definite pictures. They could apply them to the way, in the human being, that the etheric body activates the mixing and demixing, synthesis and analysis of matter. They could understand how the etheric body is working in the physical between birth and death. All we can do, by contrast, is to limit our thinking to the processes in our corpses after death, processes in keeping with the physical and chemical laws. The Greeks and their followers, as far as into the fifteenth century, could think of the working of the etheric in the physical body, by developing qualitatively the properties of fire as warm and dry, of water as cold and damp, of earth as cold and dry, and so on. By applying these four elements to the human being, one works in a far more living, inner way, which enables one to imagine the etheric body’s participation in the physical substances. By imagining this participation as living processes one becomes inwardly much more mobile, more alive, especially if one adds to one’s imagination something else the Greeks still understood in a living way. They imagined the following [a drawing is made]. You see, today we have the surface of the earth, on it the green plants. How do we today imagine the processes taking place in the world of plants? Here, too, our knowledge is limited to the explanations of the chemical analyses and syntheses taking place in the one hundred or so elements. Anything else is denied, or the attempt is made to see it according to the analogy with reciprocal mineral interaction. One would like to see the interaction of chlorophyll, the green color of the plant, with some outer entities during the plant’s growth as a process similar to that taking place in a test tube. This is not actually said in so many words, but this mode of thinking has become widespread. The plants are being studied according to their mineral properties. The Greeks, on the other hand, even though they did not express it concisely, said: “When a plant grows, the cold and dry qualities of the earth are working from below upward. Once the plant has emerged from the earth, when it grows leaves and blossoms with their beautiful colors, we see all this as the effect of water and air, in the way we imagine their qualities; and permeating all of it is the effect of fire. Everywhere in the environment there is this interaction, this intermingling of warm and dry, cold and damp, warm and damp, and all of it, all this qualitative interweaving and inter-whirling of dry, cold, damp, and warm across the surface of the earth affects the plant life.” We just have to see this. If we do, and then if we look away from the plants to the human being, to the way the etheric body is active within the human being, we shall there see something that is similar to plant life. When we look at the total life of the plant, we are inwardly stirred and stimulated, let me say, to participate in this life of the plant, in this objective life. The Greeks felt this. Outside, they said, “everything is blossoming, thriving, growing, and ever changing. All this is also working in me.” The activity of the Greek’s own etheric body, imagined in this way, was not beyond experience. The Greek reflected: “I am no stranger to what constitutes the etheric body in me. Certainly, I cannot see it. But by looking at everything that is growing around me, I experience these activities also within me.” And if such a Greek—not in a present incarnation but as an ancient Greek—were alive today, and if a modern chemist were to tell him: “Your ideas are nonsensical, childish ones. We have left them behind, discovered not four, but some one hundred elements—hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and so on”—the Greek would have responded by saying: “I have no quarrel with this, there is no harm in it. But it is no more than a specialized, detailed study of my understanding of the cold and dry qualities of the earth. You have not got beyond the knowledge of the cold and dry properties of the earth. You know nothing of water, fire, and air. You haven’t got the faintest idea of what goes on in the world of plants, of the etheric life in yourself. You cannot even speak about the plants, because your knowledge of the elements cannot give you any idea of life, of what is working in the life of plants.” Try to feel another ring to our words, how they will be living, as soon as we experience within us the greening, growing processes in the world around us, once these processes cease to be incomprehensible to us. And I can assure you that once it has again become a living experience, incorporated into education, this inner nuance permeating our words will not be limited to affecting the soul abstractly but will put color into faces again. It will transform the whole human being, will have a harmonizing effect. The teacher’s words will have a healthy ring to them, will have a different effect, regardless of anything else. All the other theories that tell us what to do, how things ought to be, are basically nothing but plants cultivated in conservatories. Real education must grow naturally. It must be absorbed into our mental images and feelings in the same way that nourishment is absorbed by the processes active in our blood and nerves, thus growing together with us in our organism. It is essentially the beginning of folly to tell someone what to do. It is as if we were to say to a stove, “You were put into the room, and it is your duty as a stove to warm the room.” A stove is filled with firewood, which is then lit, but education needs a true knowledge of the human being that can then come alive in the whole person, that can reach our feelings and also our will. It is necessary for us to develop such a knowledge. The Greeks, though, did not limit themselves to the observation of the life in plants. They looked up to the cosmos, where initially they perceived the circling planets—from the moon to Saturn, as they said. The Greeks observed the stars and felt: “Here on earth, where I am surrounded by the plants, I am permeated by the effects of fire, air, and water. The plants are permeated by fire, air, and water. What I see there also works rhythmically in me. I actually bear the whole year in me. As the processes of dry and damp and of cold and warm harmonize in the greening and decaying plants, so my etheric body works in me. The only difference is the fact that I have in me a whole world, so that what happens outside during the course of a year takes place within me in shorter rhythms.” The Greeks felt themselves as living beings within the world, felt themselves belonging to the earth beings. But then they said: “As far as the plants are concerned I can see the beginning of the interaction of earth, air, fire, and water. The etheric then extends upward with its effects. It is now met by the cosmos, by the effects of the stars, initially by the effects of the planets, on fire, air, and water. Without the planets, I would have an etheric body, the plants would exist. But I would not, for example, be able to develop the front part of my brain without the forces of Saturn, working from without. I would not have a larynx without the Mars forces, working from without. I would not have a heart without the forces raying in from without.” These thoughts prompted the further reflection: “Forces are raying in from without. The etheric is raying outward. But the forces that constitute me are raying in from indefinite cosmic distances—forces that are modified through the influence of the planets, forces extending inward from beyond the plant world.” The Greeks felt: “I could not have the front part of my brain, could not have a larynx, heart, or stomach without Saturn, Mars, the sun, or Mercury.” Through their organs, the Greeks felt themselves as much a part of the wide cosmos as they felt themselves part of earth, air, fire, and water in the etheric body. And they saw the cosmic forces whirling through each other in earth, air, fire, and water in a way that allowed the heart, the lungs, and the other organs to develop. The Greeks felt themselves to be physical products not just of the earth but of the whole cosmos. “Here I am.” they could say, “standing beside a plant. But cosmic forces are active in me. These forces also affect the plants, but merely from without. They cannot enter the plants, cannot produce organs in them. But they penetrate me and produce in me everything I share with the animals. In regard to my organizing the effects of the cosmos, I can reach as far as the zodiac. There I have exhausted the sphere in which I can observe everything that extends into my animal nature and into the animals around me. I see the animals in their characteristic forms—I see a lion, for example. In the lion I can see a definite interaction between the planets and the fixed stars, which allows me to understand why a lion has this particular shape and these particular features. The same applies to the other animals. Learning to understand the nature of the animals around me, I learn to understand the astral body. I also experience the astral body within myself, just as I experience the etheric—what is in the plants—within myself. Together with the animals of the earth, I am not merely a creature of earth but a member of the cosmos, of that which pulsates through the cosmos as a result of the existence of the stars.” Such a perception of the world can indeed permeate a human being, permeate one’s feelings, so that one may say: “Certainly, I can see objects formed according to mineral laws. But these do not include me. Neither am I a part of the plant world. And I am certainly not part of the animal world. I cannot live on the earth merely through the forces rising from the earth.” Feeling oneself within the whole of the universe essentially constituted the element in which the Greeks used to live, albeit yet instinctively. The ego was then sought outside the circle of the zodiac, in a sphere that was pure spirit, for which a physical correlate could not be found except in its outer picture, the sun. This is the idea of the sun held by the people of still earlier times; it had become somewhat decadent during the Greek cultural period. Our physicists and astronomers imagine the sun as a huge gaseous ball some twenty million miles away in the universe. This huge cosmic gas stove—without walls—radiates light and warmth in all directions. It is the only explanation, the sole idea for us—if we wish to be experts and not naive dilettantes. Indeed it is only an “expert,” a “specialist,” who could hold such a view. You will get closer to the truth by imagining the following. Imagine yourself surrounded by light. Light is everywhere. But nowhere is there an object that reflects this light. The light will then not be reflected to you; the light-filled space will be dark. You will not see anything; you will be surrounded by total darkness. Were there nothing but light, we would experience total darkness. Light only returns to us if it is caught by something; otherwise we cannot see it. In a light-filled room is total darkness. A better age than ours certainly entertained this idea. Its people knew that the sun was not a gigantic gas stove, that there was not merely an empty space up there, but less than space, a negative space. Our physicists would get the surprise of their lives if they were to travel to the sun. They would not find the imagined gas ball, would perceive nothing, not even space, but merely left-out space, an energy or force that absorbs space. This force exists. Space is everywhere. We just have to be able to imagine the “less-than-space.” In the meantime, we at least know that “less-than-no-money” means debts. Space has its boundaries, and negative space collects the light, which cannot pass through the negative emptiness, but is rayed back. Thus the sun becomes visible. Light is everywhere. What we see as the sun is only an entity that rays back, an apparatus that reflects the light. The origin of this light is, according to the Greeks, beyond the region of the zodiac. The light enters from cosmic distances and not from perceptible space. But it is collected, made visible, through the sun. This, so the Greeks said, is connected with the development of the ego, whose origin is in regions higher than the planets. The sun is connected with the ego by virtue of the fact that the sun is less than space, emptier than space—at the place of the sun all matter ceases to be and spirituality can enter. It was because the Greeks understood the spiritual nature of the sun that they felt themselves so very much related to it. Something of this living feeling, of this entering into the spirit by looking up to the cosmos, was still consciously experienced as late as the sixth century, especially during the middle of the fourth century. And because of the living feeling, events were described as resulting from the influence not of the planets but of the hierarchical beings who move what can be outwardly perceived as the planets. This living idea is necessary if we wish to arrive at a different experience of ourselves, imparted into the world as human beings. If now we take a look at the animal kingdom from this point of view, we may say that this is also within us. It produces our organs. But the animals I see are enclosed in definite forms. I have not become such a form. I do not look like a lion, a bull, an ox, or a pig. I have in me all the animals as synthesis; I have within me the disposition for all of them. If the effect of the sun had not equalized it all, I should be somebody in whom the whole of the animal kingdom were thrown together, whirling, all the animals rooting into each other. It is the effect of the sun that equalizes it, that brings it to a state of balance. And what is the result of this fact—that I bear within me the dispositions for all the animals, but in a suppressed way? It allows me to think forms, imaginations. The animals are outwardly shaped according to their imaginations; they are living imaginations, move about as imaginations. Looking at the animals I can see the world of imagination. The same forms are in me. They have become thought pictures in me, because I have not assumed their outer shape, have not made them spatial. If we were to go even further back in time, before Thales, we would find an exact knowledge taught in mystery centers. Plato recorded this knowledge in his esoteric writings. We may describe it as follows. What is logic? Living logic is zoology! What comes to expression in the animal kingdom harmonizes itself in us and, according to our predisposition, assumes a spiritually abstract form, thus producing in us living thought activity. It is the animal kingdom that is active in our life of thoughts. Ergo, logic is zoology. This knowledge was later replaced by the Socratism of Aristotle, and the consciousness was lost. The beginning of abstract logic came when the living relation of elective affinities gave way to the relation of judgment, the abstract connection of concepts—as we see them expressed in Aristotle’s logic, a logic that can drive the student preoccupied with it to despair, because in it can be found nothing concrete on which to build, nothing to hang on to. We feel, we think, we develop concepts because we have within us what is spread out, outside of us, in the animal kingdom. If we develop this view, we impart ourselves into the world in a way that is quite different. Will and feelings are then vitalized in a way that is quite different. We feel ourselves related to the nature kingdoms. And we gradually experience not only the etheric but also the astral activity in ourselves. If we are not limited by the abstract concepts taught everywhere today, but if we are inwardly stimulated by positive forms, and if we are then confronted by the fourteen- and fifteen- year-old children, we learn to observe them. What we inwardly receive will then direct our eyes and ears to the way we ought to conduct the next lesson. Our eyes are led and guided, our ears are led and guided, and only in this way will our observation of what is going on in the fourteen- and fifteen- year old students be stimulated. If we do not have this stimulation, if we do not permeate ourselves with such a spiritual science that enters our life of feelings, we confront these youngsters—as people used to say when I was young—“as the ox confronts Sunday, after having eaten grass all week.” It is this that we must give our culture, our civilization, our sciences, so that they can become real, and not only a sum total of names, a mere nominalism, so that they can kindle in us something that has meaning and reality. This will allow us to observe human beings. I do not mean that we ought to proceed craftily, recording their behavior in notebooks. No, the positive forms will come to us as though by themselves when we observe in this way. We shall arrive at a judgment of each child, need not speak about it, because it will be mobile within us. We can then raise it to consciousness, and we shall conduct our lessons according to the numerous judgments that live and surge in us, as the whole of the animal kingdom is living in true thought forms. Just think what it would mean if we had to know everything, if we had to have a clear notion of how the lion is eating a lamb, if we had to be fully conscious of that. By the same token, we cannot judge everything in our environment, cannot raise everything to an explicit consciousness. But it can be there; we can act accordingly. If we have not taken our starting point from the knowledge that only reckons with abstract concepts and abstract natural laws and that cannot possibly raise itself to such positive thought forms, then we can stand among our students and act appropriately. But how can we have anything other than such a starting point if we imagine the big gas stove without walls boiling away in the universe. Such a concept cannot lead to a better understanding of human beings. All of this must lead to the deep exploration of conscience, to our telling ourselves that unless we make every effort to permeate our life of instincts and feelings with spiritual science, we can no longer understand children in their fourteenth and fifteenth years. We learn to understand them only by progressing to such a knowledge. This is what is meant by our ever emphasizing that anthroposophy is pedagogy. In other words, anthroposophy becomes pedagogy when one gets to the stage at which one can educate. All that is needed is to take from the depths of the soul what has been put into it through anthroposophy, if it is to be applied to education. What I mean to say is that if the qualities present in each human being are given a pedagogical direction, the anthroposophical understanding of the human being will also become a true pedagogy. Yesterday I said to the teachers of the tenth grade that they should begin with a certain knowledge of the human being. Such a knowledge wishes to make us understand that we ought to place the human being again into the whole universe, according to body, soul, and spirit. We really should—if we are true teachers working on the basis of this knowledge of the human being—study anatomy and physiology, learn everything that has been produced in these fields by centuries of spiritless work. But these books should be no more than sources of information, and we should never omit to pour into them the knowledge we can gain from anthroposophy. Only this approach will shed light on the information that emerges from such books, on what is generally held to be true today. You must have a different attitude toward this literature than other people. Certainly you will be called arrogant and worse, but you will have to accept this treatment today. You will have to live with it. You will have to see in the offerings of modern science merely the source for information—just as a member of the ancient Greek culture, if such a one were to come to life today and read a book on chemistry, would say: “The things I know about the earth, that it is dry and cold, that it affects plant growth, this you specialize for me. To learn about the details is interesting. But you have no knowledge of the totality of life; you merely know a quarter of it.” We must return to a knowledge that enters our feelings and will, that permeates our whole being, that is for soul and spirit similar to the blood for the physical. Then becoming different human beings, we shall also become true teachers. The teaching profession cannot tolerate the automatization of the human being, which is the result of the various artificially grown greenhouse plants in educational theories. There are even experiments today that are supposed to lead to new concepts—experiments that show how memory works, how the will and even the thoughts are developing and running their course, harmless games that might even produce results. We need not be against games, those of children or those of the laboratory. What matters, however, is that we oppose the narrowing of the horizon that such experiments produce. |
79. Paths to Knowledge
of Higher Worlds
26 Nov 1921, Oslo Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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This imaginative knowledge brings forms into our consciousness, forms which are experienced just as livingly as any sense-perception. But they have a peculiar quality of their own. |
If the tableau of which I have spoken has been suppressed, so that an empty consciousness is established, then we have an empty consciousness for a certain time; this can be achieved if we suppress merely a concept. |
When we are subjected to hallucinations or suggestions, the ordinary consciousness is entirely supplanted by a pathological consciousness. In the state of consciousness which Anthroposophy strives to reach for the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds, the essential thing is to maintain our ordinary consciousness in its full extent, so that we keep our sound common sense and our calm state of mind while ascending to the higher worlds. |
79. Paths to Knowledge
of Higher Worlds
26 Nov 1921, Oslo Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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I have been asked to speak to-day on the subject: Paths leading to higher, that is to super-sensible knowledge. As not all of you were present at my last lecture, it will be necessary to weave into this lecture some of the more important things explained yesterday. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy strives above all towards a full harmony with the scientific truths which have emerged in the course of the past centuries. Anthroposophy is in no way directed against the efforts of natural science, as so many people believe; on the contrary, those who honestly and earnestly stand within our anthroposophical movement appreciate most of all such men as can fully judge the achievement of our modern times, resulting from scientific conscientiousness, from inner scientific feeling. It is however true that one cannot penetrate into the super-sensible worlds with the aid of the generally accepted science, and in regard to this point Anthroposophy in a certain way shares the views of the officially recognised scientists. Anthroposophy clearly recognises that people are quite right when in regard to natural science they speak of boundaries to human knowledge. Anthroposophy also recognises that one cannot step beyond these boundaries with the ordinary forces of human understanding. Consequently Anthroposophy does not even attempt to discover paths to super-sensible knowledge by applying the forces of ordinary consciousness and ordinary knowledge, but it strives not only as regards the results of scientific investigation to begin where ordinary science must come to an end, but through its methods Anthroposophy also strives to begin where the generally accepted science must come to a final point in regard to a knowledge of external Nature and also of the physical nature of the human being. Consequently Anthroposophy must not only speak of different subjects, but it must also speak in a different way. Nevertheless it is in full harmony with scientific conscientiousness and scientific discipline. Its starting point is to draw out of man’s inner being latent forces, to rouse slumbering forces of knowledge enabling the human being to penetrate into the super-sensible worlds. Anthroposophy does not say that special qualities and capacities are needed for a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, it does not declare that such a knowledge is based on qualities which can only be possessed by a few people, but it takes as its foundation forces which can be drawn out of every human soul, forces which transcend those which we inherit, as it were, from childhood onwards and which also transcend those which we gain through ordinary education, through an ordinary schooling. A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator, in the anthroposophical sense of this word, must set out from the point where he stands in ordinary life and in ordinary science; from there he must guide his development of his own accord. The forces which should be developed first of all are the forces of thinking. This is a first step in such a development, and we shall see that this does not imply the development of one-sided intellectual forces of thought, but the unfolding of the whole human being. But a beginning must be made with a particular exercise in thinking. The kind of thinking to which we are accustomed in ordinary life and also in ordinary science is given up to external observation and follows, as it were, the thread of external observation. We direct our senses towards the external world and link our thoughts with perceptions transmitted by the senses. The observation of the external world provides a firm support, enabling us to connect our experiences with the contents of our soul. It has been the endeavour of science, and rightly so, to develop more and more the support given by external observation. Observation has been enhanced by the use of scientific experimental research, where every single condition leading to different manifestations can be clearly surveyed, so that the processes become, as it were, quite transparent. For the attainment of its task, the spiritual science of Anthroposophy must deviate from this way of thinking which is entirely directed towards the objective reality outside. Anthroposophy must above all strengthen and intensify thought within the human being. In the public lecture which I gave yesterday I remarked that a muscle grows stronger if it does a certain work and that the same applies to the forces of the soul. When certain definite concepts which can easily be surveyed are again and again set at the centre of our consciousness by systematic practice, so that we completely surrender to such concepts, our thinking power grows stronger. This intensification of the forces of thinking must of course be reached in such a way as to maintain throughout our clear and complete willpower. A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical sense, may therefore take mathematics above all as an excellent example for the scientific mentality of modern times. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical it must be said that an anthroposophical spiritual investigator who wishes to transcend the stage of dilettantism, must in the first place observe a rule which already existed in the old Platonic school: That no one can penetrate into real spiritual-scientific knowledge unless he has a certain mathematical culture. What particular result can the human soul gain through mathematics? The result that everything which confronts the soul through mathematics can be inwardly surveyed, is inwardly transparent, and that mathematics contains, as it were, nothing to which we submit unconsciously, without the application of our will. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is naturally not mathematics. But a significant example may be found in the way in which one penetrates into mathematical thought. It is not mathematics in itself which constitutes this example, but — if I may coin this expression, — “mathematizing,” the activity of mathematical thinking. If such a “mathematizing” culture shows us how to transcend any illusionary or suggestive element, we shall be particularly successful in concentrating upon concepts which can be surveyed and which are quite new to us. Such concepts can be obtained from an experienced spiritual-scientific investigator, or in some other way we may seek to develop concepts which do not live in our memory. They are set in the centre of consciousness, and we then concentrate upon them with the whole life of our soul, with all our power of concentration. Our attention is turned away from everything else, and for a certain space of time which must not be too long, we try to concentrate ourselves upon such a concept, or complex of concepts. Why must such a concept or complex of concepts be something quite new? When we draw reminiscences out of memory, we can never be quite sure of what takes place within our organism, where processes may lead to certain experiences coming from the unconscious spheres outside the soul. Our cognitive power can only act freely when we confront a sense-perception, for it can be envisaged at any moment and because we are quite sure that a sense-perception is not drawn in some fantastic way out of the reminiscences of our life. The same applies to that which we now allow to fill our consciousness with the exclusion of all sense-perceptions and to which we yield completely. Though we have no sensory perceptions, we are inwardly just as living as is ordinarily the case with external sense perception. The first thing which should be borne in mind when treading the path to higher knowledge, is that our thinking, which is free from sense impressions, acquires an inner activity which completely claims the attention of our soul, in the same way in which this attention is ordinarily claimed only by an external sense perception. One might say: What we ordinarily experience in connection with an external sense impression, we should learn to experience in connection with that intensified thought-activity which is completely permeated by a clear, conscious will. This in itself sets up a strong barrier against anything which seeks to enter human consciousness in the form of suggestions, illusions, visions or hallucinations. Spiritual-scientific knowledge, in our meaning of the word, is not understood in the right way if people say: By his exercises, a spiritual investigator might after all be led to hallucinations or to similar results, he may be led into all kinds of pathological conditions of the soul. But those who earnestly consider the way in which Anthroposophy describes the path leading to higher knowledge, will see that this kind of spiritual investigation reveals most clearly of all the true nature of illusions, hallucinations or mediumistic phenomena. It rejects all this severely, as pathological elements; in fact, the results obtained by real spiritual research, clearly enable us to perceive the worthlessness of such phenomena. Then one comes to quite a new way of thinking. The old way of thinking which is used in ordinary life and in ordinary science, remains. But a new way of thinking is added to it, if we do the exercises principally characterised as thought-exercises (you will find them in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, or in my Outline of an Occult Science) and if we constantly practise them in a systematic way. (One person will need longer time for the attainment of results, and another person a shorter time). These thoughts, constituting a systematic practice, should be carried out in our consciousness as an inner soul-development. I might describe this new way of thinking which is added to the old way of thinking in the following way. Perhaps you will allow me to make a personal remark; which, however, is not meant personally, but, as you will readily admit, it belongs to the objective part of my descriptions. In the early nineties of the nineteenth century, I wrote my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in order to show that freedom really lives in man’s ethical, moral life. There it has its roots. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity called forth many misunderstandings, because people simply cannot penetrate into the way of thinking which is employed in this book. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity already employs that form of thinking which must be gained by systematic practice in order to reach a knowledge of the higher worlds. It is a first beginning in this direction, a first step which anyone can make in ordinary life. Yet it is at the same time a first step leading to a knowledge of the higher worlds. Ordinary thinking (it suffices to bear in mind the true nature of the ordinary way of thinking, in order to see that my remarks are justified)—ordinary thinking really consists of spatial perceptions. In our ordinary thinking everything is arranged spatially. Consider that even time is led back to space! For time is expressed by the movements of the clock. The same process in fact is also contained in our physical formulae. In short, we finally must come to the conclusion that ordinary thinking is a combining way of thinking, one that collects scattered elements. We use this way of thinking in our ordinary sound conditions of life, and in ordinary science. But the kind of thinking which should be used for the cognition of higher worlds and which is gained with the aid of the exercises I have described, is one which I might call morphological thinking, one in which we think in forms. This way of thinking is not limited to space; it lives within the medium of time, in the same way thinking lives within the medium of space. This thinking does not link up one thought with the other; it sets before the soul a kind of thought-organism. When we have a conception, an idea or a thought, we cannot pass over at will to another. Even as in the human organism we cannot pass over at will from the head to any other form, but must first pass over to the neck, then the shoulders, the thorax, etc., even as in an organism everything has a definite structure which must be considered as a whole, so the thinking which I characterised as morphological thinking must be inwardly mobile. As stated, it lives within the medium of time, not of space. But it is inwardly so mobile that it produces one form out of another, by constantly growing and producing an organic structure. It is this morphological way of thinking which should be added to the ordinary way of thinking. It can be attained through exercises of meditation which are described in principle in some of my books. These exercises strengthen and intensify thinking. The morphological way of thinking, the thinking activity which takes its course in forms and pictures, enables us to reach the first stage in the knowledge of super-sensible worlds, namely the stage described in my books as imaginative knowledge. Imaginative knowledge does not as yet supply anything pertaining to an external world. To begin with, it leads only to man’s self-knowledge, but it is a far deeper knowledge of self than the one which is ordinarily reached by self-contemplation. This imaginative knowledge brings forms into our consciousness, forms which are experienced just as livingly as any sense-perception. But they have a peculiar quality of their own. Our ordinary thoughts could not live within our consciousness in a sound way if we were unable to remember them. In regard to spiritual health and a sound development of soul-life, a very great deal depends upon our remembering capacity, upon our memory. Only those who have a continuous memory in their waking-life condition, a memory which goes back to a certain moment in childhood, can be said to be of sound mind. Perhaps you will also have heard of the terrible condition of certain psychopathic people due to the fact that certain memories are blotted out. Psychiatry knows this state in which memories are blotted out, and it shows us the great importance of a continuous memory if the human soul is to live in a sound condition. This applies to the ordinary development of thought. But it does not apply to the way of thinking just characterised as morphological or imaginative thinking. When our eye, or some other sense-organ is turned to some external object, the perception can be experienced only as long as our sense-organ is exposed to it. In the same way morphological thinking, or imaginative thinking, only exists while we experience it, and what thus arises within imaginative thinking cannot in the ordinary sense be impressed upon our memory. It must be called forth every time afresh, if it is to be experienced. Those who reach such an organic-morphological way of thinking which develops as it were into a living process of growth, cannot retain the results of this thinking in their ordinary memory. Freedom, too, can only be characterised by ascending to such growing, constantly developing way of thinking. This is why my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity gave rise to so many misunderstandings. But it had to be transmitted through this method of thinking, because freedom is a spiritual experience and it is impossible to come to it with ordinary combining thinking. Beginners in the method of spiritual science generally think that an imaginative experience can be impressed on the soul like any other thought. But this is not the case. An imaginative thought vanishes from our consciousness. The only thing which can be retained is the way in which the imaginative experience was reached. The conditions can be reconstructed, thus giving rise to the experience. If we wish to see again a flower which we have already seen, we must return to it and look at it; in the same way, the inner processes leading to an imaginative experience must be recalled, if we wish to have this experience again. A spiritual-scientific content cannot be remembered without further ado. This even applies to the most elementary things in honest spiritual-scientific investigation. Here again, allow me to mention something personal, but which is also an objective fact. You see, what an anthroposophical investigator of spiritual science has to say, cannot, as it were, be transmitted day by day in the form of lectures, in the same way in which natural-scientific facts are generally advanced. Scientific facts can be remembered, they live in our memory and can be set forth with the aid of memory. But the facts which a spiritual-scientific investigator has to advance, must come from his inner living experience. He cannot prepare himself in the same way in which one generally prepares lectures based on memory. The only thing he can do is to reconstruct the conditions enabling him to experience the most elementary facts of spiritual science. We should realise that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy leads in its very first steps to a development of otherwise dormant forces of the human soul, and we should not think that any results can be reached in regard to higher worlds through ordinary philosophical speculations. The imaginative knowledge described to you just now, leads, as already stated, to a kind of self-knowledge. Finally it leads us to a great tableau in which we simultaneously survey all the organic elements that have built up our whole life from our earthly birth onwards. Inwardly we perceive the creative formative forces which build up the human being and we first perceive them in connection with our own self. We can see this tableau in the same way in which certain people in danger of death (even natural-scientific thinkers admit this), for instance, when they are drowning, see before them a weaving, living picture of their past life; we do not however, see it as a memory-picture, we do not look upon the small details of life, but we survey its chief facts, the forces which made us progress. We see, as it were, a deeper memory-tableau. At the same time, this tableau does not merely set before us the ordinary thinking life of the soul, but that inner life which works upon the physical organism from the soul. This conception leads to a standpoint that makes it appear childish that even in the first decades of the 19th century people should have spoken in a speculative way of vital forces, of vitalism. Anthroposophy does not speak of such a vital force. It speaks instead of the conception of life, of what I call the etheric body, or body of formative forces, which represents on the one hand a soul-element, and on the other, a condensed, intensified soul-element which works upon the physical organism. We are thus led to a deeper knowledge of the soul and also to a deeper knowledge of the way in which the soul-element works within the organism. Let me now give you an example, an elementary but characteristic example: You know that recognised modern psychology does not go beyond certain speculative ideas in regard to the connections which exist between the soul and the body. The soul is described as if it were the body’s motive force, and scientists with a more materialistic mentality consider the body as a plus, which as it were, produces the soul. Most frequently of all modern psycho-physicists speak of parallelism, viz., that psychic phenomena and bodily phenomena follow a parallel course, and so forth. But all these things are mere speculations, simply based on the fact that people are unwilling to penetrate with the scientific spirit that prevails elsewhere into the psychical-bodily life of man. You are all acquainted with the physical concept of latent heat contained in every object, but which does not manifest itself as heat. But this heat can be freed, it is said, if certain conditions are created, and in that case it manifests itself. But before the heat appeared, it existed in the objects as a latent force, where it gives rise to something which does not reveal itself outwardly through heat-processes. We therefore speak of latent heat and of heat which is set free. This conception — of course, duly modified and extended — should be applied to the soul-life, by observing it in a concrete way, and not speculatively. We can observe the child’s growth until the time of its second dentition around the seventh year. Far more than one generally thinks is connected with this second dentition. If we observe the soul-bodily processes in an unprejudiced way, we can see that after the second dentition the child’s whole way of thinking, its whole life of representation and feeling, in fact the whole life of the soul, undergoes a complete change. When the child changes its teeth, it reaches a final point in regard to a certain direction of life. After the second dentition, the human being no longer requires certain forces for the development of his physical organism which he formerly required. The forces which push out (if I may use this trivial expression) the second teeth are not merely localised in the human head, but they are forces which work in the whole body and manifest themselves locally when the second teeth appear. They exist however in the whole physical organism. Those who observe this whole process as objectively as natural scientists are accustomed to observe and think in natural science, reach the point of recognising that the forces which push out the second teeth were latent forces, bound up with the physical organism. They gave the child’s physical body its structure, but with the second dentition they were set free, so that they can now appear in the child as soul-spiritual forces. Here we may see concretely how the soul-spiritual forces and the bodily organisation are inter-related. This is not seen speculatively, but in a real, concrete way. Those who only wish to observe the soul at one moment and then the body, may speculate or experiment for a long time, yet they will only come to quite abstract results in regard to the connection which exists between the soul and the body. But those who observe the processes in the sequence of time, will find that after the second dentition certain soul-forces appear in the child revealing a more sharply outlined concept of memory, more sharply outlined feelings, and they will know that these are forces in the soul which were set free and which now manifest, whereas formerly they were submerged in the physical organism. Observations, not mere speculative thought, shows them the connection between the body and the soul. This example shows us how we should investigate the inter-activity of soul and body with the aid of imaginative thought. We gain insight into the activity of the soul-spiritual forces in the physical-bodily organisation. This is what is presented in the tableau which I have described. If we have reached the point of developing this imaginative way of thinking, we must proceed further with the strength thus gained. Even as a muscle grows stronger through practice, so the thinking power grows stronger if we do these exercises which are described in greater detail in the books mentioned. If we develop within us an intensified thinking endowed with plastic forces which lives in time, other forces of our soul may be developed and intensified. The ordinary thoughts of life come and go, or we try to get rid of them either by discarding them from our soul, or the organism sees to it that we forget them, and so forth. But the thoughts of the kind described, which are called up in our consciousness for the sake of gaining higher knowledge, cannot be blotted out as easily as ordinary thoughts. A great effort must be made to forget them. This is a second kind of exercise: an artificial forgetting, as it were, an artificial suppression of thought. If we have practised this artificial suppression of thought for a sufficiently long time, corresponding to our individual development and predispositions, we become able to suppress the whole tableau of which I have spoken, so that our consciousness is quite empty. The only thing which should remain to us is our calm thinking power, permeated by the will. But this thinking now appears in a new form. I have now described to you two ways of thinking: the ordinary way of thinking which is connected with space, and a way of thinking which has a growth of its own, in which one thought always grows out of the other, even as in a living organism one limb is connected with the other. If this morphological way of thinking is practised for a certain time, we gradually develop a third way of thinking, which we need in order to ascend to a higher stage of super-sensible knowledge. We need this kind of thinking when we rise to a stage which is higher than that in which we merely survey our own organisation. Imaginative knowledge leads us to a survey of our own organisation, so that we say to ourselves: Here on earth, the soul-spiritual element, which is super-sensible, works upon the physical body. We must use this morphological way of thinking, for otherwise it is not possible to understand what takes place in the medium of time and works upon the physical body out of a super-sensible sphere, for this is something which undergoes continual metamorphoses. Our thinking must become mobile and our thoughts must be inwardly connected with each other. Mere combining thought cannot grasp the life which proceeds from the spirit, this can only be grasped by an inwardly living thinking. But still another way of thinking must be developed if we wish to rise up to the next stage of super-sensible knowledge. Let me use an example in order to explain this to you. Even this example is difficult to penetrate, but I think you will be able to grasp what I mean. Let us bear in mind the fact that Goethe tried to interpret the single cranial bones as metamorphoses of the vertebrae. In the single bones of the skull Goethe perceived transformations of the vertebra. Though somewhat modified, modern science also adopts this view, but it is no longer entirely in keeping with Goethe’s conception; nevertheless this view is valid to-day. It does not suffice, however, to consider the purely morphological derivation of the cranial bones. We must go further if we wish to understand the relationship of the human head to the remaining human organism (we will restrict ourselves to the skeleton). We must not only envisage a transformation, but something very different. Let us ask, for instance: What relation exists between the bony system of the arms or legs and the bony system of the cranial bones, of the bones of the head? Here it is the case that the metamorphoses through which one form gives rise to the other can only be grasped if we bear in mind that this is not only a spatial metamorphosis taking place within the medium of time, but that quite another process takes place which is very difficult to understand, namely, a kind of turning over, a reversal. If you wish to grasp the mutual relation between the bones of the leg and the bones of the skull, you must compare the external surface of the skull with the inner surface of a hollow bone, let us say of the upper thigh bone. This means that the inner side of the thigh bone must be turned inside out, so that also its elasticity would change; its inner surface would in that case be turned outwards and correspond to the external surface of a cranial bone; and vice versa, the outer surface of the thigh bone would not correspond to the outer surface of the cranium, but to its inner surface. Imagine this process of metamorphosis like a glove which is turned inside out, but at the same time the elasticity of the glove undergoes a change. A new form arises. It is as if the glove is not only turned inside out, but takes on quite a different shape through the new elasticity. You see, as a first indication of this third kind of thinking I must bring before you a very complicated process. This kind of thinking does not only live in constantly changing forms, but it is able to reverse the inner structure, so as to change its form. This can only be achieved through the fact that now our thinking no longer lives in the medium of time, for in this process of reversion the subject of our thoughts transcends space and time and penetrates into a reality which lies beyond space and time. I know that we cannot immediately become familiar with this third kind of thinking, which differs so greatly from the combining and the plastic ways of thinking. It is not easy to penetrate into this third kind of thinking, which dives down, as it were, into spacelessness and timelessness; it is not easy to understand that it reappears in a changed form turned inside out. Anthroposophy does not wish to speak of the higher worlds in the amateurish way adopted by so many people, but because Anthroposophy is as honest as any other honest science it must point out that it is not only necessary to abandon the sphere of higher science, but that it is even necessary to acquire a completely new way of thinking. If we wish to advance to a qualitative thinking man’s inner forces must be held together in an entirely different way, for the whole quality of our thinking undergoes a change during this process of reversal, when the inner is turned into the outer. When we succeed in submerging our thought into a qualitative element, it is possible to ascend to that stage of knowledge of the super-sensible worlds which follows the stage of imaginative thought. If the tableau of which I have spoken has been suppressed, so that an empty consciousness is established, then we have an empty consciousness for a certain time; this can be achieved if we suppress merely a concept. But when such a reality is suppressed, when we suppress forces which are constantly at the service of growth and nutrition during our earthly existence, we dive down into a completely new world. We then really are in the higher worlds and the ordinary physical world lies behind us like a memory. We must have it as a memory, for otherwise we should not be of sound mind; without memory we should be psychopaths, subjected to hallucinations and to illusions. If we proceed in the right way along the path of spiritual investigation, we maintain our calm thoughtful consciousness permeated by the will even when we ascend to the highest worlds and there can be no question of falling a prey to hallucinations or suggestions. When we are subjected to hallucinations or suggestions, the ordinary consciousness is entirely supplanted by a pathological consciousness. In the state of consciousness which Anthroposophy strives to reach for the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds, the essential thing is to maintain our ordinary consciousness in its full extent, so that we keep our sound common sense and our calm state of mind while ascending to the higher worlds. Even the thinking strengthened with the reversion of thought already mentioned, or the super-morphological thought, even this exists only for the sake of penetrating in full consciousness into the higher worlds. We then really experience the higher worlds and their spiritual contents. Through the imaginative consciousness which enables us to gain a conception of the forces working in us from birth onwards, a conception of super-sensible forces working upon the physical body, we gain knowledge of that part of our being which existed before our birth, or before we were conceived within the physical world, when we still lived in a soul-spiritual world surrounded by soul-spiritual beings, even as here on earth, during the time between birth and death, we are surrounded by physical beings. In short, we experience the eternal kernel of man’s being, when we look behind birth into that stage of existence through which we passed before the earth received us into the physical stream of heredity; we experience man’s eternal being in his spiritual environment. Thus it is neither speculation, nor a system of thought that has led us to a knowledge of the higher worlds; it is a beholding. Even as the development of the body, from the embryonic stage onwards, gives us a conception of the external physical world, so the steps described to you in principle (details can be found in the books I have mentioned) lead us to a knowledge of soul-processes and enable us to live in a spiritual world in which we existed before birth and into which we enter when we pass through the portal of death. Objective vision leads to a knowledge of the higher worlds. I have now described to you in the first place a path of knowledge. But this is incompletely described if it is merely described as a path of knowledge, for the experiences which we gain call for something besides a mere activity of thought. Though it may be difficult to acquire these two higher forms of thinking, there is something else which presents far greater difficulties. If here in the physical world we preferably cling to observation and experiments, it is because in a certain way this sets our mind at rest in regard to the reality of our knowledge. From the standpoint of a theory of knowledge one may dispute about the true nature of sense-perceptions and their relation to reality, etc., but this is not the point just now; the point is that sense-perception gives us a guarantee for the truth of our soul’s experience, the reflected images of our sense-perceptions which arise in the soul; we set our minds at rest by leaning upon the external reality. The disease of spiritism has arisen in recent times; which in just such a way seeks to establish the reality of the spiritual by external observation. One cannot of course be a stronger materialist than by being a spiritist. Spiritism is but the enhanced form of materialism, for in spiritism people not only wish to establish the reality of physical substance, which they perhaps consider as the only reality, but they even wish to show that the spirit appears in the same form as matter, i.e. that the spirit itself is nothing but matter. What arises in the form of spiritism is the last phase of materialism and draws out of it the last consequences. [See Rudolf Steiner: “Geschichte des Spiritismus” and “Geschichte des Hypnotismus and Sonnambulismus.”] Real spiritual science seeks for an ascent into the spiritual worlds and not a drawing down of the spiritual worlds into material processes. But when we ascend to the spiritual world in the manner described we no longer have the support which the external world provides, as it were, for our soul-experiences. We need something which gives the certainty that we are not floating in emptiness, that our soul-experiences in the higher worlds are not mere fancies; we need a support in the same way in which the external sense perceptions give us a support in our ordinary life. This again can only be reached through the development of inner forces. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that the forces which we already have in ordinary life (one has to speak in terms taken from ordinary life) suffice. We must develop forces even in spheres which are not the spheres of thought, in order to reach not only vision, but vision rooted in reality. The assurance which our sense-perceptions provide from outside, consists in the fact that one sense supports the other. When we have an impression of sound or of sight, we do not immediately know whether this is a hallucination or not. We can only be sure of the impression gained, when we are supported — I might say — by the sense of gravitation, when another sense comes to our aid, when an impression which is not sufficiently guaranteed by the sense of sight or hearing can be supported by some other sense. What is it that gives us the right to speak of reality in the physical world? Several things may be taken into consideration. I should have to speak for hours from the standpoint of a theory of knowledge (of course, I cannot do this now) in order to prove the fact which I now briefly wish to summarize. But if you follow the corresponding train of thought you will see that the following fact can be accepted: In the physical world we designate a fact as “real” when it influences us in such a way that we should be obliged to deny our own existence were we to deny the existence of that thing. If you not only hear the sound of a bell, but if you can touch it and discover its connection with other things, you would have to blot out your own self if you were not able to say that the external object is real, when you experience its reality within your soul. An external object can be called real, if we should have to deny our own reality in denying the reality of the object. What we describe as reality is therefore intimately related with our own reality. That is why forces must also be drawn out of our own reality, which is a soul-spiritual reality, and these moral forces may be compared with an object which I grasp and which shows itself to be heavy. Within our own being we must seek supporting forces for the reality of the spiritual worlds into which we penetrate in the way I have described. This can only be done if we develop certain moral qualities which we already have in our ordinary ethical attitude in life; the moral forces must be strengthened in the same way in which we strengthen the force of thought. These moral forces should not only be developed for the sake of our ethical life, they must be further strengthened. Let me now speak to you only of two kinds. The first is what we call moral courage, or courage in general; this should be intensified in the same way in which the forces of thinking are intensified. The forces of courage within us may be intensified if the retrospective tableau arising through imagination is placed before the soul and we then look upon it and experience it in the right way. We then discover a higher kind of courage in our own life; when diving down into this tableau we discover inner forces of courage which are greater than those which we generally use in our external life, which is more or less passive. This courage should be intensified. There is another moral force which should be intensified. Whereas courage is generally connected with the life of feeling and resembles an inner sense of sureness, a certain inner power, it is necessary to unfold certain forces which are connected with the will and which consist, for example, in the fact that at certain given moments we determine to do something, which we set about to do at some later time, by establishing with an iron will the conditions which enable us to carry out our resolution. An Anthroposophical spiritual investigator should carry out these exercises quite systematically. He should inwardly connect his present will-impulses with impulses that were in him at a former time. In our ordinary life we give ourselves up to the present. But in the life which is to bring us into higher worlds we must visualise with an inner continuity of the will. Throughout many years we should be able to hold a purpose in mind and carry out at some later time things which we once resolved to do. This unfolds strong forces which support the will; it develops a strong current of volition which we ourselves establish within us. This a special form of self-discipline. We are then no longer dependent on external circumstances or on ideals which induce us to do certain things, but by the will-impulse we inwardly connect in a soul-spiritual manner a later moment of our soul-life with an earlier moment. If a higher form of courage unfolds within our soul, if we develop the continuity of our will-impulses so that our will-impulses endure over the gulfs of time then we come to the point of ascending into the higher worlds, we shall be able to verify the reality of what we then perceive in the same way in which we do this in regard to the external physical world. The reality which we perceive there must be verified with the aid of inwardly intensified forces. Hence the path leading to the spiritual worlds is not the development of a one-sided cognitive force, but the development of the whole human being in the direction of thinking, feeling and will, which implies a striving after knowledge, an aesthetic striving and an ethical striving. This path leading to the higher worlds is at the same time a religious immersion, a religious deepening of the human being. There is one essential point which should be borne in mind: In modern times, even as through science to a great extent doubts have arisen in regard to the spiritual worlds, so through science these spiritual worlds must be conquered again. It is shortsighted to believe that the religious life must suffer through the fact that it is possible to ascend to the spiritual worlds with the same clear consciousness that we have in the physical world. Those who advance criticism in this respect, generally do so because they think that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy remains within the limits of the intellect and rationalism. This is not the case. The whole human being, with his feeling and his will, flows into the development of thought, which is acquired in the manner I have described. The path leading to higher worlds indicated by the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is the unfolding and the development of the whole human being. Even as in ordinary physical life thinking grows out of the organism like a flower, so higher knowledge grows out of the fully developed human being, who unfolds all his forces harmoniously and intensively along the path leading to the higher worlds. Through the development of mere thinking we only come to a world of images. If reality is to be perceived within this world of images, we must develop in the way I have indicated the courage contained in moral forces, the will contained in our character, our own individual will which we maintain throughout periods of time. These two forces, and others, which you will find described in the books already mentioned before, should be intensified. The human being as a whole must be led in a soul-spiritual way into those other worlds in which he lives before he is conceived by physical forces and enters physical life on earth or in which he lives after passing through the portal of death. If we wish to ascend to this life with knowledge, if we wish to acquire the vision of the super-sensible worlds, the whole soul-spiritual being of man must be led towards them — not only some vague part of him which desires to become acquainted with these worlds theoretically. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy can therefore fructify the whole life of man. Anthroposophy does not seek in some abstruse mystical way to estrange us from the world, but strives on the contrary to lead us into practical life, into a life which is truly practical. That is why it can be so fruitful for science and art, social and religious life—in short, for the most different spheres of life. I can only give a few indications in this connection. If we can see the life-tableau of retrospective vision of which I have spoken, a tableau which is in reality a structure of formative forces moving in the stream of time, if we can recognise this structure, we can also see how the human body arises out of this system of forces and how it develops. For it is only an external illusion to speak of the heart, the lungs, etc.; in reality, the heart is a process, and the external spatial form of the heart is merely the process which is held fast for a time. This applies to every organ. What is retained for a moment within a certain shape, can be perceived. But we cannot perceive the incessant life-process giving rise to health and illness unless we attain to a knowledge of the super-sensible formative forces of the body. Medicine, and therapy in particular, can be essentially fructified by spiritual science, and we have already opened Clinical-therapeutic Institutes in Stuttgart and Dornach where the sickness of humanity can benefit from knowledge derived from Anthroposophy. Spiritual science can fructify life in many other directions. When a School for Spiritual Science was opened at Dornach it was not possible to give it any ordinary kind of frame. What the friends of our anthroposophical world-conception had in mind when they wished to erect a building for a school of spiritual science was something quite special. Let me explain this by a comparison. Take a nut with its shell. An unprejudiced person will think that the nut’s shell must have the form which it has, because the nut itself has a definite form. The shell forms part of the nut. When a spiritual world-conception, such as that contained in the Anthroposophical movement, is called into life, the members may find themselves in the position to erect a building and they may think: Let us go to an architect who will draw us a plan in this or in that style, in accordance with traditional customs, or something thought out which would not in any way be connected with the things which are to be cultivated within it — just as if the nut’s shell were not to fit the nut! Since Anthroposophy is not a mere theory, and does not merely live in words, the Anthroposophical Movement can therefore not proceed in this way, not even in regard to its frame. At Dornach, the words which resound from the speaker’s platform, the scenes on the stage, whatever art is presented through word or movement from the stage, must have exactly the same inner essential style as that which is expressed in the walls, in the external architecture of the Building. Even as the shell of the nut is formed by the same forces which formed the nut, so the Anthroposophical realities which come to expression in the world must have an artistic frame and call into being a new style of architecture. It was therefore an organic necessity for a new style of architecture to arise in Dornach. This new style is simply the externally visible part of the reality which lives soul-spiritually in the world. One will be able to see what is the intention of Anthroposophy to-day just through the fructifying influence which it exercises also upon the artistic spheres of life. In Eurhythmy, which is only a beginning, we called into life a human art of movement in which the single artists or the groups of artists do not dance or pantomime, but in which the forms of movement constitute a speech based on laws just as strict as those of spoken language, or a visible song, similar to that which one ordinarily hears in the form of sound. Eurhythmy is entirely drawn out of the law of man, in spirit, soul and body. Through Anthroposophy we have thus been able to exercise a fructifying influence on many different spheres of art. In my Threefold State the attempt has been made to face the great social problems of the present time from the anthroposophical standpoint. Those who bear in mind that from the anthroposophical standpoint the whole human being has to be taken into account in the social question, and not only that part which is accessible to a rationalistic science, to Marxism and similar directions of thought, must admit that forces which penetrate into the higher spiritual worlds can also penetrate into the social laws of human life, for these in fact are soul-spiritual laws pertaining to the higher worlds; they can also lead us to laws which are able to call into existence satisfactory social conditions in human life. For it is a spiritual element which unites human beings in their life in common, and physical links are simply formed out of the spiritual. The terrible catastrophe of the present time and the decadent forces which now hold sway are largely due to the fact that people forget this spiritual foundation. Humanity must again permeate itself with the spirit. Anthroposophy has also had a fructifying influence on education, pedagogy. At the Waldorf School at Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt, the results of anthroposophical research in the direction of a true knowledge of man are applied to the developing human being, to the child. The paths which lead us to the higher worlds also enable us to observe the child year by year and week by week, as it develops from birth to puberty; it enables us to see in the child the forces which it brought with it from the spiritual worlds and which the teacher or the educator must conjure forth. I can only give a few indications in this direction, for at the Waldorf School we have tried to develop all these things in detail into an art of education. These are a few examples showing how Anthroposophy can influence different spheres of life. I already told you that Anthroposophy can also fructify religious life, because it leads in a scientific way to the higher worlds and because it shows us the true nature of man’s eternal being which he bears in his transient earthly existence as an ever-developing spiritual element not accessible to the ordinary forces of cognition. It shows this eternal essence in its own element, in the super-sensible worlds. Higher vision can discover it there. Here it is concealed, because when it enters earthly life through birth it becomes absorbed by the physical form. But this fact does not deprive the spirit of its living forces, for the physical substance only conceals it. The spiritual can however be perceived in physical substance, in matter. An aid to such an insight is provided by the paths leading to the super-sensible worlds, which Anthroposophy seeks to indicate. Anthroposophy does not wish on this account to lead us away from the ordinary world into asceticism, but it opens out the paths to the spirit, to the super-sensible worlds in such a way that with the aid of the spirit we can once more form and shape material, practical life. The essential thing is to recognise a creative power in the spirit. The spiritual world would be weak indeed were we to experience it only as an uncreative element transcending matter. There are many people who say: The physical aspect of the world is something low, let us rise above it; let us abandon matter in order to reach high spiritual spheres. Many things assuredly must be overcome in order to attain a knowledge of this spirit, but when we have reached it through love (and it can only be reached through love, through religious devotion and warmth, for the development of the moral capacities mentioned above lead us, through love, into the super-sensible worlds) then we take hold of the spiritual, super-sensible essence as we approach matter. For the strong spiritual element is not one which flees matter, but one which forms matter, which can be spiritually active within matter. This is one aspect. On the other hand let me tell you one other thing which should be borne in mind, my dear fellow-students, namely that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, treads the paths leading to the super-sensible worlds in such a way that the results obtained along these paths do not stand outside the ordinary natural-scientific facts and their operations, but penetrate them as a soul-spiritual force. Even as a person is a full human being in the true meaning of the word because here on earth he lives in a physical body which bears within it a soul-spiritual element, so science can only be science in the full meaning of the word if it is not a mere knowledge of the external, physical reality, but if this knowledge can be permeated by the knowledge of the spiritual worlds. For this reason the spiritual science of Anthroposophy wishes to set itself within the other science by meeting the demands of the being and nature both of man and of the universe. Even as in his physical life man must bear within him spirit and soul, so a real spiritual science which opens up true reliable ways into the super-sensible spiritual worlds, must become the spirit and soul of ordinary science dealing with the physical world. And even as the spirit and the soul in man do not fight or rebel against the body, but should harmonise with it fully, so the spiritual science of Anthroposophy should be in full harmony with real, genuine knowledge of nature and history. |
310. Human Values in Education: Descent into the Physical Body, Goethe and Schiller
18 Jul 1924, Arnheim Tr. Vera Compton-Burnett Rudolf Steiner |
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It is very easy to think that a child can be educated and taught if one observes only what takes place in childhood and youth; but this is not enough. |
What one usually does today is to study the child—even if this is done in a less external way than I described yesterday—in order to discover how best to help him. |
Walking is only the crudest expression of this process. Before learning to walk the child is not exposed to the necessity of finding his equilibrium in the world: now he learns to do this. |
310. Human Values in Education: Descent into the Physical Body, Goethe and Schiller
18 Jul 1924, Arnheim Tr. Vera Compton-Burnett Rudolf Steiner |
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In this course of lectures I want in the first place to speak about the way in which the art of education can be furthered and enriched by an understanding of man. I shall therefore approach the subject in the way I indicated in my introductory lecture, when I tried to show how anthroposophy can be a practical help in gaining a true knowledge of man, not merely a knowledge of the child, but a knowledge of the whole human being. I showed how anthroposophy, just because it has an all-embracing knowledge of the whole human being—that is to say a knowledge of the whole of human life from birth to death, in so far as this takes place on earth—how just because of this it can point out in a right way what is essential for the education and instruction of the child. It is very easy to think that a child can be educated and taught if one observes only what takes place in childhood and youth; but this is not enough. On the contrary, just as with the plant, if you introduce some substance into the growing shoot its effect will be shown in the blossom or the fruit, so it is with human life. The effect of what is implanted into the child in his earliest years, or is drawn out of him during those years, will sometimes appear in the latest years of life; and often it is not realised that, when at about the age of 50 someone develops an illness or infirmity, the cause lies in a wrong education or a wrong method of teaching in the 7th or 8th year. What one usually does today is to study the child—even if this is done in a less external way than I described yesterday—in order to discover how best to help him. This is not enough. So today I should like to lay certain foundations, on the basis of which I shall proceed to show how the whole of human life can be observed by means of spiritual science. I said yesterday that man should be observed as a being consisting of body, soul and spirit, and in yesterday's public lecture I gave some indication of how it is the super-sensible in man, the higher man within man, that is enduring, that continues from birth until death, while the substances of the external physical body are always changing. It is therefore essential to learn to know human life in such a way that one perceives what is taking place on earth as a development of the pre-earthly life. We have not only those soul qualities within us that had their beginning at birth or at conception, but we bear within us pre-earthly qualities of soul, indeed, we bear within us the results of past earthly lives. All this lives and works and weaves within us, and during earthly life we have to prepare what will then pass through the gate of death and live again after death beyond the earth, in the world of soul and spirit. We must therefore understand how the super-earthly works into earthly life, for it is also present between birth and death. It works, only in a hidden way, in what is of a bodily nature, and one does not understand the body if one has no understanding of the spiritual forces active within it. Let us now proceed to study further what I have just indicated. We can do so by taking concrete examples. An approach to the knowledge of man is contained in anthroposophical literature, for instance in my book Theosophy, in An Outline Of Occult Science or in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Let us start from what can lead to a real, concrete knowledge of man by taking as a foundation what anthroposophy has to say in general about man and the world. There are two examples which I should like to put before you, two personalities who are certainly well known to you all. I choose them because for many years I made an intensive study of both of them. I am taking two men of genius; later on we shall come down to less gifted personalities. We shall then see that anthroposophy does not only speak in a general, abstract way, but is able to penetrate deeply into real human beings and is able to get to know them in such a way that knowledge of man is shown to be something which has reality in practical life. In choosing these two examples, Goethe and Schiller, and so making an indirect approach, I hope to show how a knowledge of man is acquired under the influence of Spiritual Science. Let us look at Goethe and Schiller from an outward point of view, as they appeared during the course of their lives, but let us in each case study the whole personality. In Goethe we have an individuality who entered life in a remarkable way. He was born black, or rather dark blue. This shows how extraordinarily difficult it was for his soul-spiritual being to enter into physical incarnation. But once this had taken place, once Goethe had overcome the resistance of this physical body, he was entirely within it. On the one hand it is hard to imagine a more healthy nature than Goethe had as a boy. He was amazingly healthy. He was so healthy that his teachers found him quite difficult; but children who give no trouble are seldom those who enjoy the best health in later life. On the other hand, children who are rather a nuisance to their teachers are those who accomplish more in later life because they have more active, energetic natures. The understanding teacher will therefore be quite glad when the children keep a sharp eye on him. Goethe from his earliest childhood was very much inclined to do this, even in the literal sense of the word. He peeped at the fingers of someone playing the piano and then named one finger “Thumbkin,” another “Pointerkin,” and so on. But it was not only in this sense that he kept a sharp eye on his teachers. Even in his boyhood he was bright and wide-awake; and this at times gave them trouble. Later on in Leipzig Goethe went through a severe illness, but here we must bear in mind that certain hard experiences and some sowing of wild oats were necessary in order to bring about a lowering of his health to the point at which he could be attacked by the illness which he suffered at Leipzig. After this illness we see that Goethe throughout this whole life is a man of robust health, but one who possesses at the same time an extraordinary sensitivity. He reacts strongly to impressions of all kinds, but does not allow them to take hold of him and enter deeply into his organism. He does not suffer from heart trouble when he is deeply moved by some experience, but he feels any such experience intensely; and this sensitivity of soul goes with him throughout life. He suffers, but his suffering does not find expression in physical illness. This shows that his bodily health was exceptionally sound. Moreover, Goethe felt called upon to exercise restraint in his way of looking at things. He did not sink into a sort of hazy mysticism and say, as is so often said: “O, it is not a question of paying heed to the external physical form; that is of small importance. We must turn our gaze to what is spiritual!” On the contrary, to a man with Goethe's healthy outlook the spiritual and the physical are one. And he alone can understand such a personality who is able to behold the spiritual through the image of the physical. Goethe was tall when he sat, and short when he stood. When he stood you could see that he had short legs. [The German has the word Sitzgrösse for this condition.] This is an especially important characteristic for the observer who is able to regard man as a whole. Why had Goethe short legs? Short legs are the cause of a certain kind of walk. Goethe took short steps because the upper part of his body was heavy—heavy and long—and he placed his foot firmly on the ground. As teachers we must observe such things, so that we can study them in the children. Why is it that a person has short legs and a particularly big upper part of the body? It is the outward sign that such a person is able to bring to harmonious expression in the present earth life what he experienced in a previous life on earth. In this respect also Goethe was extraordinarily harmonious, for right into extreme old age he was able to develop everything that lay in his karma. Indeed he lived to be so old because he was able to bring to fruition the potential gifts with which karma had endowed him. After Goethe had left the physical body, this body was still so beautiful that all who saw him in death were fulfilled with wonder. One has the impression that Goethe had experienced to the full his karmic potentialities; now nothing more is left, and he must begin afresh when again he enters into an earthly body under completely new conditions. All this is expressed in the particular formation of such a body as Goethe's, for the cause of what man brings with him as predisposition from an earlier incarnation is revealed for the most part in the formation of the head. Now Goethe from his youth up had a wonderfully beautiful Apollo head, from which only harmonious forces streamed down into his physical body. This body, however, burdened by the weight of its upper part and with too short legs was the cause of his special kind of walk which lasted throughout his life. The whole man was a wonderfully harmonious expression of karmic predisposition and karmic fulfilment. Every detail of Goethe's life illustrates this. Such a personality, standing so harmoniously in life and becoming so old, must inevitably have outstanding experiences in his middle years. Goethe was born in 1749 and he died in 1832, so he lived to be 83 years old. He reached middle age, therefore, at about his 41st year in 1790. If we take these years between 1790 and 1800 we have the middle decade of his life. In this decade, before 1800, Goethe did indeed experience the most important events of his life. Before this time he was not able to bring his philosophical and scientific ideas, important as they were, to any very definite formulation. The Metamorphosis of the Plants was first published in 1790; everything connected with it belongs to this decade 1790-1800. In 1790 Goethe was so far from completing his Faust that he brought it out as a Fragment; he had no idea then that he would ever finish it. It was in this decade that under the influence of his friendship with Schiller he conceived the bold idea of continuing his Faust. The great scenes, the Prologue in Heaven among others, belong to this period. So in Goethe we have to do with an exceptionally harmonious life; with a life moreover that runs its quiet course, undisturbed by inner conflict, devoted freely and contemplatively to the outer world. As a contrast let us look at the life of Schiller. From the outset Schiller is placed into a situation in life which shows a continual disharmony between his life of soul and spirit and his physical body. His head completely lacks the harmonious formation which we find in Goethe. He is even ugly, ugly in a way that does not hide his gifts, but nevertheless ugly. In spite of this a strong personality is shown in the way he holds himself, and this comes to expression in his features also, particularly in the formation of the nose. Schiller is not long-bodied; he has long legs. On the other hand everything that lies between the head and the limbs, in the region of the circulation and breathing is in his case definitely sick, poorly developed from birth, and he suffers throughout his life from cramps. To begin with there are long periods between the attacks, but later they become almost incessant. They become indeed so severe that he is unable to accept any invitation to a meal; but has to make it a condition—as for instance on one occasion when coming to Berlin—that he is invited for the whole day, so that he may be able to choose a time free from such pains. The cause of all this is an imperfect development of the circulatory and breathing systems. The question therefore arises: What lies karmically, coming from a previous earthly life, in the case of a man who has to suffer in this way from cramping pains? Such pains, when they gain a hold in human life, point quite directly to a man's karma. If, with a sense of earnest scientific responsibility, one attempts to investigate these cramp phenomena from the standpoint of spiritual science, one always finds a definite karmic cause underlying them, the results of deeds, thoughts and feelings coming from an earlier life on earth. Now we have the man before us, and one of two things can happen. Either everything goes as harmoniously as with Goethe, so that one says to oneself: Here we have to do with Karma; here everything appears as the result of Karma. Or the opposite can also happen. Through special conditions which arise when a man descends out of the spiritual world into the physical, he comes into a situation in which he is not able fully to work through the burden of his karma. Man comes down from the spiritual world with definite karmic predispositions; he bears these within him. Let us assume that A in the diagram represents a place, a definite point of time in the life of a man when he should be able in some way to realise, to fulfil his karma, but for some reason this does not happen. Then the fulfilment of his karma is interrupted and a certain time must pass when, as it were, his karma makes a pause; it has to be postponed until the next life on earth. And so it goes on. Again, at B there comes a place when he should be able to fulfil something of his karma; but once more he has to pause and again postpone this part of his karma until his next incarnation. Now when someone is obliged to interrupt his karma in this way pains of a cramping nature always make their appearance in the course of life. Such a person is unable fully to fashion and shape into his life what he always bears within him. Here we have something which shows the true character of spiritual science. It does not indulge in fantasy, neither does it talk in vague, general terms about the four members of man's being; physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. On the contrary, it penetrates into real life, and is able to point out where the real spiritual causes lie for certain external occurrences. It knows how man represents himself in outer life. This knowledge is what true spiritual science must be able to achieve. I was now faced with the question: In a life such as Schiller's, how does karma work as the shaper of the whole of life if, as in his case, conditions are such that karma cannot properly operate, so that he has to make continual efforts to achieve what he has the will to achieve? For Goethe it was really comparatively easy to complete his great works. For Schiller the act of creation is always very difficult. He has, as it were, to attack his karma, and the way in which he goes to the attack will only show its results in the following earthly life. So one day I had to put to myself the following question: What is the connection between such a life as Schiller's and the more general conditions of life? If one sets about answering such a question in a superficial way nothing of any significance emerges, even with the help of the investigations of spiritual science. Here one may not spin a web of fantasy; one must observe. Nevertheless if one approaches straight away the first object that presents itself for observation, one will somehow go off on a side track. So I considered the question in the following way: How does a life take its course when karmic hindrances or other pre-earthly conditions are present? I then proceeded to study certain individuals in whom something of this kind had already happened, and I will now give such an example. I could give many similar examples, but I will take one which I can describe quite exactly. I had an acquaintance, a personality whom I knew very well indeed in his present earthly life. I was able to establish that there were no hindrances in his life connected with the fulfilment of karma, but there were hindrances resulting from what had taken place in his existence between death and a new birth, that is in his super-sensible life between the last earthly life and the one in which I learned to know him. So in this case there were not, as with Schiller, hindrances preventing the fulfilment of karma, but hindrances in the way of bringing down into the physical body what he had experienced between death and a new birth in the super-sensible world. In observing this man one could see that he had experienced much of real significance between death and a new birth, but was not able to give expression to this in life. He had entered into karmic relationships with other people and had incarnated at a time when it was not possible fully to realise on earth what he had, as it were, piled up as the content of his inner soul experience between death and conception. And what were the physical manifestations which appeared as the result of his not being able to realise what had been present in him in the super-sensible world? These showed themselves through the fact that this personality was a stutterer; he had an impediment in his speech. And if one now takes a further step and investigates the causes at work in the soul which result in speech disturbances, then one always finds that there is some hindrance preventing what was experienced between death and a new birth in the super-sensible world from being brought down through the body into the physical world. Now the question arises: How do matters stand in the case of such a personality who has very much in him brought about through his previous karma, but who has it all stored up in the existence between death and a new birth and, because he cannot bring it down becomes a stutterer? What sort of things are bound up with such a personality in his life here on earth? Again and again one could say to oneself: This man has in him many great qualities that he has gained in pre-earthly life, but he cannot bring them down to earth. He was quite able to bring down what can be developed in the formation of the physical body up to the time of the change of teeth; he could even develop extremely well what takes place between the change of teeth and puberty. He then became a personality with outstanding literary and artistic ability, for he was able to form and fashion what can be developed between puberty and the 30th year of life. Now, however, there arose a deep concern in one versed in a true knowledge of man, a concern which may be expressed in the following question: How will it be with this personality when he enters his thirties and should then develop to an ever increasing degree the spiritual or consciousness soul in addition to the intellectual or mind soul? Anyone who has knowledge of these things feels the deepest concern in such a case, for he cannot think that the consciousness soul—which needs for its unfolding everything that arises in the head, perfect and complete—will be able to come to its full development. For with this personality the fact that he stuttered showed that not everything in the region of his head was in proper order. Now apart from stuttering this man was as sound as a bell, except that in addition to the stutter, (which showed that not everything was in order in the head system) he suffered from a squint. This again was a sign that he had not been able to bring down into the present earthly life all that he had absorbed in the super-sensible life between death and a new birth. Now one day this man came to me and said: “I have made up my mind to be operated on for my squint.” I was not in a position to do more than say, “If I were you, I should not have it done.” I did all I could to dissuade him. I did not at that time see the whole situation as clearly as I do today, for what I am telling you happened more than 20 years ago. But I was greatly concerned about this operation. Well, he did not follow my advice and the operation took place. Now note what happened. Very soon after the operation, which was extremely successful, as such operations often are, he came to me in jubilant mood and said, “Now I shall not squint any more.” He was just a little vain, as many distinguished people often are. But I was very troubled; and only a few days later the man died, having just completed his 30th year. The doctors diagnosed typhoid, but it was not typhoid, he died of meningitis. There is no need for the spiritual investigator to become heartless when he considers such a life; on the contrary his human sympathy is deepened thereby. But at the same time he sees through life and comprehends it in its manifold aspects and relationships. He perceives that what was experienced spiritually between death and a new birth cannot be brought down into the present life and that this comes to expression in physical defects. Unless the right kind of education can intervene, which was not possible in this case, life cannot be extended beyond certain definite limits. Please do not believe that I am asserting that anybody who squints must die at 30. Negative instances are never intended and it may well be that something else enters karmically into life which enables the person in question to live to a ripe old age. But in the case we are considering there was cause for anxiety because of the demands made on the head, which resulted in squinting and stuttering, and the question arose: How can a man with an organisation of this kind live beyond the 35th year? It is at this point of time that one must look back on a person's karma, and then you will see immediately that it in no way followed that because somebody had a squint he must die at 30. For if we take a man who has so prepared himself in pre-earthly life that he has been able to absorb a great deal between death and a new birth, but is unable to bring down what he has received into physical life, and if we consider every aspect of his karma, we find that this particular personality might quite well have lived beyond the 35th year; but then, besides all other conditions, he would have had to bear within him the impulse leading to a spiritual conception of man and of the world. For this man had a natural disposition for spiritual things which one rarely meets; but in spite of this, because strong spiritual impulses inherent in him from previous earth lives were too one-sided, he could not approach the spiritual. I assure you that I am in a position to speak about such a matter. I was very friendly with this man and was therefore well aware of the deep cleft that existed between my own conception of the world and his. From the intellectual standpoint we could understand one another very well; we could be on excellent terms in other ways, but it was not possible to speak to him about the things of the spirit. Thus because with his 35th year it would have been necessary for him to find his way to a spiritual life, if his potential gifts up to this age were to be realised on earth, and because he was not able to come to a spiritual life, he died when he did. It is of course perfectly possible to stutter and have a squint and yet continue one's life as an ordinary mortal. There is no need to be afraid of things which must be stated at times if one wishes to describe realities, and not waste one's breath in mere phrases. Moreover from this example you can see how observation, sharpened by spiritual insight, enables one to look deeply into human life. And now let us return to Schiller. When we consider the life of Schiller two things strike us above all others, for they are quite remarkable. There exists an unfinished drama by Schiller, a mere sketch, called the Malteser. We see from the concept underlying this sketch that if Schiller had wished to complete this drama, he could only have done so as an initiate, as one who had experienced initiation. It could not have been done otherwise. Up to a certain degree at least he possessed the inner qualities necessary for initiation, but owing to other conditions of his karma these qualities could not get through; they were suppressed, cramped. There was a cramping of his soul life too which can be seen in the sketch of the Malteser. There are long powerful sentences which never manage to get to the full stop. What is in him cannot find its way out. Now it is interesting to observe that with Goethe, too, we have such unfinished sketches, but we see that in his case, whenever he left something unfinished, he did so because he was too easy-going to carry it further. He could have finished it. Only in extreme old age, when a certain condition of sclerosis had set in would this have been impossible for him. With Schiller however we have another picture. An iron will is present in him when he makes the effort to develop the Malteser but he cannot do it. He only gets as far as a slight sketch. For this drama, seen in its reality, contains what, since the time of the Crusades, has been preserved in the way of all kinds of occultism, mysticism, and initiation science. And Schiller sets to work on such a drama, for the completion of which he would have had to bear within him the experience of initiation. Truly a life's destiny which is deeply moving for one who is able to see behind these things and look into the real being of this man. And from the time it became known that Schiller had in mind to write a drama such as the Malteser there was a tremendous increase in the opposition to him in Germany. He was feared. People were afraid that in his drama he might betray all kinds of occult secrets. The second work about which I wish to speak is the following. Schiller is unable to finish the Malteser; he cannot get on with it. He lets some time go by and writes all manner of things which are certainly worthy of admiration, but which can also be admired by so-called philistines. If he could have completed the Malteser, it would have been a drama calling for the attention of men with the most powerful and vigorous minds. But he had to put it aside. After a while he gets a new impulse which inspires his later work. He cannot think any more about the Malteser, but he begins to compose his Demetrius. This portrays a remarkable problem of destiny, the story of the false Demetrius who takes the place of another man. All the conflicting destinies which enter into the story as though emerging out of the most hidden causes, all the human emotions thereby aroused, would have had to be brought into this drama, if it were to be completed. Schiller sets to work on it with feverish activity. It became generally known—and people were still more afraid that things would be brought into the open which it was to their interest to keep hidden from the rest of mankind for some time yet. And now certain things take place in the life of Schiller which, for anyone who understands them, cannot be accounted for on the grounds of a normal illness. We have a remarkable picture of this illness of Schiller's. Something tremendous happens—tremendous not only in regard to its greatness, but in regard to its shattering force. Schiller is taken ill while writing his Demetrius. On his sick bed in raging fever he continually repeats almost the whole of Demetrius. It seems as though some alien power is at work in Schiller, expressing itself through his body. There is of course no ground for accusing anyone. But, in spite of everything that has been written in this connection, one cannot do otherwise than come to the conclusion, from the whole picture of the illness, that in some way or another, even if in a quite occult way, something contributed to the rapid termination of Schiller's illness in his death. That people had some suspicion of this may be gathered from the fact that Goethe, who could do nothing, but suspected much, dared not participate personally in any way during the last days of Schiller's life, not even after his death, although he felt this deeply. He dared not venture to make known the thoughts he bore within him. With these remarks I only want to point out that for anyone able to see through such things Schiller was undoubtedly pre-destined to create works of a high spiritual order, but on account of inner and outer causes, inner and outer karmic reasons, it was all held back, dammed up, as it were, within him. I venture to say that for the spiritual investigator there is nothing of greater interest than to set himself the problem of studying what Schiller achieved in the last ten years of his life, from the Aesthetic Letters onwards, and then to follow the course of his life after death. A deep penetration into Schiller's soul after death reveals manifold inspirations coming to him from the spiritual world. Here we have the reason why Schiller had to die in his middle forties. His condition of cramp and his whole build, especially the ugly formation of his head, made it impossible for him to bring down into the physical body the content of his soul and spirit, deeply rooted as this was in spiritual existence. When we bear such things in mind we must admit that the study of human life is deepened if we make use of what anthroposophy can give. We learn to look right into human life. In bringing these examples before you my sole purpose was to show how through anthroposophy one learns to contemplate the life of human beings. But let us now look at the matter as a whole. Can we not deepen our feeling and understanding for everything that is human simply by looking at a single human life in the way that we have done? If at a certain definite moment of life one can say to oneself: Thus it was with Schiller, thus with Goethe; thus it was with another young man—as I have told you—then, will not something be stirred in our souls which will teach us to look upon every child in a deeper way? Will not every human life become a sacred riddle to us? Shall we not learn to contemplate every human life, every human being, with much greater, much more inward attention? And can we not, just because a knowledge of man has been inscribed in this way into our souls, deepen within us a love of mankind? Can we not with this human love, deepened by a study of man which gives such profundity to the most inward, sacred riddle of life—can we not, with this love, enter rightly upon the task of education when life itself has become so sacred to us? Will not the teacher's task be transformed from mere ideological phrases or dream-like mysticism into a truly priestly calling ready for its task when Divine Grace sends human beings down into earthly life? Everything depends on the development of such feelings. The essential thing about anthroposophy is not mere theoretical teaching, so that we know that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego; that there is a law of karma, of reincarnation and so on. People can be very clever, they can know everything; but they are not anthroposophists in the true sense of the word when they only know these things in an ordinary way, as they might know the content of a cookery book. What matters is that the life of human souls is quickened and deepened by the anthroposophical world conception and that one then learns to work and act out of a soul-life thus deepened and quickened. This then is the first task to be undertaken in furthering an education based on anthroposophy. From the outset one should work in such a way that teachers and educators may become in the deepest sense “knowers of men,” so that out of their own conviction, as a result of observing human beings in the right way, they approach the child with the love born out of this kind of thinking. It follows therefore that in a training course for teachers wishing to work in an anthroposophical sense the first approach is not to say: you should do it like this or like that, you should employ this or that educational knack, but the first thing is to awaken a true educational sense born out of a knowledge of man. If one has been successful in bringing this to the point of awakening in the teacher a real love of education then one can say that he is now ready to begin his work as an educator. In education based on a knowledge of man, such for instance as the Waldorf School education, the first thing to be considered is not the imparting of rules, not the giving advice as to how one should educate, but the first thing is to hold Training Courses for Teachers in such a way that one finds the hearts of the teachers and so deepens these hearts that love for the child grows out of them. It is quite natural that every teacher believes that he can, as it were, impose this love on himself, but such an imposed human love can achieve nothing. Much good will may be behind it, but it can achieve nothing. The only human love which can achieve something is that which arises out of a deepened observation of individual cases. If someone really wishes to develop an understanding of the essential principles of education based on a knowledge of man—whether he has already acquired a knowledge of spiritual science or whether, as can also happen, he has an instinctive understanding of these things—he will observe the child in such a way that he is faced with this question: What is the main trend of a child's development up to the time of the change of teeth? An intimate study of man will show that up to the change of teeth the child is a completely different being from what he becomes later on. A tremendous inner transformation takes place at this time, and there is another tremendous transformation at puberty. Just think what the change of teeth signifies for the growing child. It is only the outer sign for deep changes which are taking place in the whole human being, changes which occur only once, for only once do we get our second teeth, not every seven years. With the change of teeth the formative process taking place in the teeth comes to an end. From now on we have to keep our teeth for the rest of our lives. The most we can do is to have them stopped, or replaced by false ones, for we get no others out of our organism. Why is this? It is because with the change of teeth the organisation of the head is brought to a certain conclusion. If we are aware of this, if in each single case we ask ourselves: What actually is it that is brought to a conclusion with the change of teeth?—we are led, just at this point, to a comprehension of the whole human organisation, body, soul and spirit. And if—with our gaze deepened by a love gained through a knowledge of man such as I have described—we observe the child up to the change of teeth, we shall see that during these years he learns to walk, to speak and to think. These are the three most outstanding faculties to be developed up to the change of teeth. Walking entails more than just learning to walk. Walking is only one manifestation of what is actually taking place, for it involves learning to adapt oneself to the world through acquiring a sense of balance. Walking is only the crudest expression of this process. Before learning to walk the child is not exposed to the necessity of finding his equilibrium in the world: now he learns to do this. How does it come about? It comes about through the fact that man is born with a head which requires a quite definite position in regard to the forces of balance. The secret of the human head is shown very clearly in the physical body. You must bear in mind that an average human brain weighs between 1,200 and 1,500 grammes. Now if such a weight as this were to press on the delicate veins which lie at the base of the brain they would be crushed immediately. This is prevented by the fact that this heavy brain floats in the cerebral fluid that fills our head. You will doubtless remember from your studies in physics that when a body floats in a fluid it loses as much of its weight as the weight of the fluid it displaces. If you apply this to the brain you will discover that our brain presses on its base with a weight of about 20 grammes only; the rest of the weight is lost in the cerebral fluid. Thus at birth man's brain has to be so placed that its weight can be brought into proper proportion in regard to the displaced cerebral fluid. This adjustment is made when we raise ourselves from the crawling to the upright posture. The position of the head must now be brought into relationship with the rest of the organism. Walking and using the hands make it necessary for the head to be brought into a definite position. Man's sense of balance proceeds from the head. Let us go further. At birth man's head is relatively highly organised, for up to a point it is already formed in the embryo, although it is not fully developed until the change of teeth. What however is first established during the time up to the change of teeth, what then receives its special outer organisation, is the rhythmic system of man. If people would only observe physical physiological processes more closely they would see how important the establishing of the circulatory and breathing systems is for the first seven years. They would recognise how here above all great damage can be done if the bodily life of the child does not develop in the right way. One must therefore reckon with the fact that in these first years of life something is at work which is only now establishing its own laws in the circulatory and breathing systems. The child feels unconsciously how his life forces are working in his circulation and breathing. And just as a physical organ, the brain, must bring about a state of balance, so must the soul in the first years of life play its part in the development of the breathing and circulatory systems. The physical body must be active in bringing about a state of balance proceeding from the head. The soul, in that it is rightly organised for this purpose, must be active in the changes that take place in the circulation and breathing. And just as the upright carriage and learning to use the hands and arms are connected with what comes to expression in the brain, so the way in which speech develops in man is connected with the systems of circulation and breathing. Through learning to speak man establishes a relationship with his circulation and breathing, just as he establishes a relationship between walking and grasping and the forces of the head by learning to hold the latter in such a way that the brain loses the right amount of weight. If you train yourself to perceive these relationships and then you meet someone with a clear, high-pitched voice particularly well-suited to the recitation of hymns or odes, or even to declamatory moral harangues, you may be sure that this is connected with special conditions of the circulatory system. Or again if you meet someone with a rough, harsh voice, with a voice like the beating together of sheets of brass and tin, you may be sure that this too is connected with the breathing or circulatory systems. But there is more to it than this. When one learns to listen to a child's voice, whether it be harmonious and pleasant, or harsh and discordant, and when one knows that this is connected with movements of the lungs and the circulation of the blood, movements inwardly vibrating through the whole man, right into the fingers and toes, then one knows that what is expressed through speech is imbued with qualities of soul. And now something in the nature of a higher man, so to say, makes its appearance, something which finds its expression in this picture relating speech with the physical processes of circulation and breathing. Taking our start from this point it is possible to look up and see into the pre-natal life of man which is subject to those conditions which we have made our own between death and a new birth. What a man has experienced in pre-earthly conditions plays in here, and so we learn that if we are to comprehend the being of man by means of true human understanding and knowledge we must train our ear to a spiritual hearing and listen to the voices of children. We can then know how to help a child whose strident voice betrays the fact that there is some kind of obstruction in his karma and we can do something to free him from such karmic hindrances. From all this we can see what is necessary for education. It is nothing less than a knowledge of man; not merely the sort of knowledge that says: “This is a gifted personality, this is a good fellow, this is a bad one,” but the kind of knowledge that follows up what lies in the human being, follows up for instance what is spiritually present in speech and traces this right down into the physical body, so that one is not faced with an abstract spirituality but with a spirituality which comes to expression in the physical image of man. Then, as a teacher, you can set to work in such a way that you take into consideration both spirit and body and are thus able to help the physical provide a right foundation for the spirit. And further, if you observe a child from behind and see that he has short legs, so that the upper part of the body is too heavy a burden and his tread is consequently also heavy, you will know, if you have acquired the right way of looking at these things, that here the former earthly life is speaking, here karma is speaking. Or, for instance if you observe someone who walks in the same way as the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who always walked with his heels well down first, and even when he spoke did so in such a way that the words came out, as it were “heels first,” then you will see in such a man another expression of karma. In this way we learn to recognise karma in the child through observation based on spiritual science. This is something of the greatest importance which we must look into and understand. Our one and only help as teachers is that we learn to observe human beings, to observe the bodies of the children, the souls of the children and the spirits of the children. In this way a knowledge of man must make itself felt in the sphere of education, but it must be a knowledge which is deepened in soul and spirit. With this lecture I wanted to call up a picture, to give an idea of what we are trying to achieve in education, and what can arise in the way of practical educational results from what many people consider to be highly unpractical, what they look upon as being merely fantastic day-dreaming. |
304a. Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy II: Education and the Moral Life
26 Mar 1923, Stuttgart Tr. Ruth Pusch, Gertrude Teutsch, Roland Everett Rudolf Steiner |
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Now let’s assume that a child has witnessed in the surroundings repugnant scenes from which the child had inwardly recoiled in terror. |
For together with this consolidation of trust, the moral character of the child also becomes consolidated. At first it was only latent in the child; now it becomes inwardly more anchored and the child attains inner firmness. |
This new relationship can be properly served by bringing to the child at this time the grammar and logic inherent in language. One can tackle practically every aspect of language if, instead of rashly bringing to consciousness the unconscious element of language from early childhood, one makes this translation in a way that considers the child. |
304a. Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy II: Education and the Moral Life
26 Mar 1923, Stuttgart Tr. Ruth Pusch, Gertrude Teutsch, Roland Everett Rudolf Steiner |
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Everyone involved to any degree at all in social life will certainly feel that the moral aspect is one of the most important aspects in the entire field of education. At the same time, one realizes that it is precisely this aspect that is the most subtle and difficult one to handle, for it relates to the most intimate area of education. I have already emphasized that educational practice needs to be built on real knowledge of, and insight into, the human being. The comprehension, perception and observation that I tried to characterize last night will give the knowledge necessary to train the child’s cognitional capacities. Practically speaking, knowledge of the human being, supported by the science of the spirit, will enable one to reach, more or less easily, the child’s powers of cognition. One will be able to find one’s way to the child. If, on the other hand, one wishes to appeal to a child’s artistic receptivity as described yesterday, which is equally important, it is necessary to find a way to each child individually, to have a sense for the way various children express themselves from an artistic comprehension of the world. When it comes to moral education, all of one’s skill for sensitive observation and all of one’s intimate psychological interest must be kept in mind, so that all the teacher’s knowledge of the human being and of nature can be put at the service of what each child brings forth individually. To reach children in a moral way, the only choice is to approach each child on an individual basis. However, with regard to moral education, yet another difficulty has to be overcome—that is, an individual’s sense of morality can only be appealed to through full inner freedom and with full inner cooperation. This requires that educators approach moral teaching so that, when later in life the students have passed the age of formal education, they can feel free as individuals in every respect. What teachers must never do is to pass on to developing students the relics of their own brand of morality or anything derived from personal sympathies or antipathies in the moral realm. We must not be tempted to give our own ethical codes to young people as they make their way into life, since these will leave them unfree when it becomes necessary that they find their own moral impulses. We must respect and acknowledge the young person’s complete inner freedom, particularly in the realm of moral education. Such respect and tolerance truly demand a great deal of selflessness from educators, and a renunciation of any self-interest. Nor is there, as is the case in all other subject matters, the opportunity of treating morality as a subject in its own right; as such, it would be very unfruitful. The moral element must be allowed to pervade all of one’s teaching. These difficulties can be overcome if we have truly made our own and imbued with spiritual science the knowledge that we bring to the pupils. Such knowledge, by opening one’s eyes to each individual child, is all-important, particularly in this moral sphere. Ideally speaking, moral education would have to begin with the first breath taken in by the newborn, and in a certain sense, this really is what must be done. The great pedagogue Jean Paul (who is far too little recognized, unfortunately) said that a child learns more of value during the first three years of life than during the three years spent at university. If these words were to be applied more to the moral aspect of education than to the cognitive and esthetic realms, they could be rephrased as follows: How an adult educator acts around the child is particularly important during the child’s first years, until approximately the change of teeth—that is, until we receive the child into our schools. The first life period really needs to be examined closely. Those who have embarked on the path to a true knowledge of the human being will need to consider three main stages during this first life period. At first sight, they do not seem directly connected with the moral aspect, but they nevertheless shed light on the child’s entire moral life to come, right up to the point of death. In the first developmental phase of the child, the moral is tightly linked with the natural. In fact a crude psychology makes it difficult to notice the connection between later moral development and the child’s natural development during these first years. The three stages in the child’s development are usually not granted enough importance, yet they more or less determine the whole manner in which the child can become a human being inhabiting the Earth. The first one, when the child arises from what could be termed an animal-like existence yet in the human realm, is generally called “learning to walk.” In learning to walk, the child has the possibility of placing into the world the entire system of movements—that is, the sum of all potential movements that human beings can perform with their limbs, so that a certain equilibrium is achieved. The second stage, when the child gains something for the entire course of life, is “learning to speak.” It is the force through which children integrate themselves into the human environment, whereas by learning to walk, children learned to integrate themselves into the whole world through a whole system of movements. All of this happens in the unconscious depths of the human soul. And the third element the child appropriates is “learning to think.” However indistinct and childlike thinking may appear during the first life period, it is through learning to speak that the child gradually develops the capacity to make mental images, although in a primitive way at first. We may ask: How does the child’s acquisition of the three capacities of walking, speaking, and thinking lead to further development, until the conclusion of the first life period when the permanent teeth appear? The answer seems simple enough at first, but when comprehended with some depth, it sheds tremendous light on all of human nature. We find that during this first life period, ending with the change of teeth, the child is essentially a being who imitates in a state of complete unconsciousness, finds a relationship to the world through imitation and through trial and error. Until age seven, children are entirely given over to the influences coming from their environment. The following comparison can be made: I breathe in the oxygen of the air, which is part of my surroundings, to unite, at the next moment, my bodily nature with it, thus changing some part of the external world into my own inner world, where it works, lives, and weaves within me. Likewise, with each indrawn breath, children up to the age of seven bring outer influences into their “inner soul breath,” by incorporating every gesture, facial expression, act, word, and even each thought coming from their surroundings. Just as the oxygen in my surroundings pulsates in my lungs, the instruments of my breathing, and blood circulation, so everything that is part of the surroundings pulsates through the young child. This truth needs to stand before the soul’s eye, not just superficially, but with real psychological impact. For remarkable consequences follow when one is sufficiently aware of the child’s adaptation to its surroundings. I will discover how surprisingly the little child’s soul reverberates with even an unspoken thought, which may have affected my facial expression only fleetingly and ever so slightly, and under whose influence I may have slowed or speeded up my movements, no matter how minutely. It is astonishing how the small details that remain hidden within the adult’s soul are prolonged into the child’s soul; how the child’s life is drawn into the physical happenings of the surroundings, but also into the soul and spiritual environment. If we become sensitive to this fact of life, we will not permit ourselves even one impure, unchaste, or immoral thought near young children, because we know how imponderable influences work on children through their natural ability to imitate everything in their surroundings. A feeling for this fact and the attitude it creates are what make a person into a real educator. Impressions that come from the company of adults around the child make a deep, though unconscious, imprint in the child’s soul, like a seal in soft wax; most important among them are those images of a moral character. What is expressed as energy and courage for life in the child’s father, how the father behaves in a variety of life situations, these things will always stamp themselves deeply into the child’s soul, and will continue their existence there in an extraordinarily characteristic, though subtle and intimate, way. A father’s energy will energize the entire organization of the child. A mother’s benevolence, kindness, and love, surrounding the child like an invisible cocoon, will unconsciously permeate the child’s inner being with a moral receptivity, with an openness and interest for ethical and moral matters. It is very important to identify the origin of the forces in the child’s organization. As unlikely and paradoxical as this may sound to modern ears, in the young child these forces derive predominately from the nerve-and-sense system. Because the child’s ability to observe and perceive is unconscious, one does not notice how intensely and deeply the impressions coming from the surroundings enter its organization, not so much by way of various specific senses, as through the general “sensory being” of the child. It is generally known that the formation of the brain and of the nerves is completed by the change of teeth. During the first seven years the nerve-and-sense organization of the child could be compared with soft wax, in its plasticity. During this time, not only does the child receive the finest and most intimate impressions from the surroundings, but also, through the workings of energy in the nerve-and-sense system, everything received unconsciously radiates and flows into the blood circulation, into the firmness and reliability of the breathing process, into the growth of the tissues, into the formation of the muscles and skeleton. By means of the nerve-and-sense system, the child’s body becomes like an imprint of the surroundings and, particularly, of the morality inherent in them. When we receive children into school at the time of the change of teeth, it is as if we received the imprint of a seal in the way the muscles and tissues are formed, even in the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation, in the rhythm of the digestive system with its reliability or its tendency toward sluggishness; in short, in the children’s physical makeup we find the effects of the moral impressions received during the first seven years. Today we have anthropology and we have psychology. Anthropology’s main concern is the abstract observation of the physical aspect of the human being, while that of psychology is the abstract observation of the human soul and spirit as entities separate from the physical body. What is missing is the anthroposophical perspective, which observes the human being—body, soul, and spirit—as a unity; a point of view that shows everywhere how and where spirit is flowing into matter, sending its forces into material counterparts. The strange feature of our materialistic age is that materialism cannot recognize matter for what it is. Materialism believes it can observe matter wholly externally. But only if one can see how soul and spiritual processes are everywhere streaming and radiating their forces into material processes, does one really know what matter is. Through spiritual knowledge, one learns to know how matter works and what its real nature is. One could answer the question, “What is materialism?” by saying, “Materialism is the one worldview that does not understand matter.” This can be followed up even in details. If one has learned how to see the nature of the human being by viewing body, soul, and spirit as a unity, one will also recognize, in the formation of the muscles and tissues and in the breathing process, the ethical courage inherent in surroundings to which children have adapted during the first seven years. One sees, not only the moral love that warmed them, in the form of harmonious ethical attitudes in their environment, but also the consequences of disharmonious ethical attitudes and lack of love in the surroundings. Here a perceptive educator cannot help feeling that, by the time children are received by the school, they are already formed from the moral viewpoint—an insight that, taken seriously, could in itself engender a mood of tragedy. Given the difficult, disorderly, and chaotic social conditions of our time, it might almost seem preferable from a moral viewpoint if children could be taken into one’s care soon after birth. For if one knows the human being out of a sensitive and refined psychology, one realizes how serious it is that by the time the child loses the first teeth, moral predispositions are fixed. On the other hand, this very same psychological insight offers the possibility of identifying the child’s specific moral disposition and needs. Children absorb environmental impressions, especially those of an ethical nature, as if in a dream. These dreams go on to affect the inmost physical organization of children. If children have unconsciously experienced and perceived courage, moral goodness, chastity, and a sense of truth, these qualities will live on in them. The presence of these qualities will be such that during the second life period, by the time children are in school, these qualities can still be mobilized. I would like to illustrate this with an example: Let’s assume that a child has spent the earliest years under the influence of an environment conducive to introversion. This could easily happen if a child witnesses lack of courage and even downright cowardice in the surroundings. If a child has seen in the environment a tendency to opt out of life, witnessed dissatisfaction with life or despondency, something in the child’s inner being, so to speak, will evoke the impression of a continuously suppressed pallor. The educator who is not perceptive enough to observe such symptoms will find that the child takes in more and more intensely the effects of the lack of energy, the cowardice and doubt that has been witnessed in the surroundings. In some ways, even the child will exhibit such characteristics. But if one can view these things with greater depth, one will find that, what thus began as a distinct characterological disposition during the first seven years, can now be seized educationally and directed in a more positive way. It is possible to guide a child’s innate timidity, lack of courage, shyness or faintheartedness so that these same inherent forces become transmuted into prudence and the ability to judge a situation properly; this presumes that the teacher uses classroom opportunities to introduce examples of prudence and right judgment appropriate to the child’s age and understanding. Now let’s assume that a child has witnessed in the surroundings repugnant scenes from which the child had inwardly recoiled in terror. The child will carry such experiences into school life in the form of a characterological disposition, affecting even the bodily organization. If such a trait is left unnoticed, it will continue to develop according to what the child had previously absorbed from the environment. On the other hand, if true insight into human nature shows how to reorient such negative characteristics, the latter can be transformed into a quality of purity and a noble feeling of modesty. These specific examples illustrate that, although the child brings into school an imprint—even in the physical organization—of the moral attitudes witnessed in the earlier environment, the forces that the child has thus absorbed can be redirected in the most diverse ways. In school we have an immensely important opportunity to correct an unbalanced disposition through a genuine, intimate, and practical sense of psychology, which can be developed by the educator who notices the various tendencies of character, will, and psyche in the students. By loving attentiveness to what the child’s nature is revealing, the teacher is in a position to divert into positive channels what may have developed as an unhealthy or harmful influence from the early environment. For one can state explicitly that, in the majority of cases, nothing is ever so negative or evil in an ethical predisposition that the child cannot be changed for the better, given a teacher’s insight and willing energy. Contemporary society places far too little trust in the working of ethical and moral forces. People simply do not know how intensely moral forces affect the child’s physical health, or that physical debilitation can be improved and corrected through proper and wholesome educational practice. But assuming we know, for example, that if left uncorrected a characteristic trait in a child could turn into violence later on, and that it can be changed so that the same child will grow into a courageous adult, quick and ready to respond to life’s tasks—assuming that an intimate yet practical psychology has taught us these things, the following question will arise: How can we guide the moral education of the child, especially during the age of primary education? What means do we have at our disposal? To understand the answer, we will again have to look back at the three most significant stages in the development of the very young child. The power of mental imagery and thinking that a child has developed until this point will continue to develop. One does not notice an abrupt change—perhaps at most, with the change of teeth, that the kind of mental imagery connected with memory takes on a different form. But one will notice that the soul and physical forces revealed in speech, which are closely linked to breathing and to the rhythmic system, will reappear, metamorphosed, during the years between the change of teeth and puberty. The first relationship to the realm of language is founded through the child’s learning to speak during the first years of life. Language here includes not just language itself in the restricted meaning of the word, for the entire human being, body, soul, and spirit, lives in language. Language is a symptom of the entire threefold human being. Approximately between the ages of seven and fourteen years, however, this relationship to language becomes prominent in the child in an entirely different—even reversed—way. At that point, everything related to the soul, outwardly expressed through the medium of language, will reach a different phase of development and take on a different character. It is true that these things happen mostly in the unconscious, but they are nevertheless instrumental for the child’s entire development. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child wrestles with what lives in the language, and if he or she should speak more than one language, in all the languages spoken. The child knows little of this struggle because it remains unconscious. The nature of this wrestling is due to increasingly intense merging of the sounds issuing from the rhythmic system with the pupil’s thoughts, feelings, and will impulses. What is trying to evolve during this life period is the young adolescent’s hold on the self by means of language. It is extremely important, therefore, that we understand the fine nuances of character expressed in the ways students bring their speech and language into the classroom. The general directions I have already presented regarding the observation of the pupils’ moral environment now sound back to us out of the tone of their voices, out of the very sound of their speech, if we are sensitive enough to perceive it. Through the way children use language, they present us with what I would call their basic moral character. Through the way we treat language and through the way students speak during lessons, every hour, even every minute, we are presented with the opportunity as teachers to guide what is thus revealed through speech, into the channels we consider appropriate and right. Very much can be done there, if one knows how to train during the age of primary education what, until the change of teeth, was struggling to become speech. This is where we meet the actual principle of the growth and development that occurs during the elementary school age. During the first years up to the change of teeth, everything falls under the principle of imitation. At this stage the human being is an imitator. During the second life period, from the second dentition until puberty, the child is destined to surrender to what I would call the authority of the teacher. You will hardly expect me, the author of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, to plead for the principle of authority per se. But for the time between the child’s change of teeth and puberty, one has to plead for the principle of self-evident authority, simply because during these years the child’s very nature needs to be able to look up to what comes from the authority of the adult. The very young child observes the surroundings unconsciously. One could almost say that a child breathes in the whole character of the environment during the first seven years. The next seven years are spent not so much breathing in the environment, but listening to what it has to say. The word and its meaning now become the leading motive. The word becomes the guiding principle as a simple matter of human nature. During this stage the child learns to know about the world and the cosmos through the mediation of the educator. Whatever reaches the pupils through the mouth of the teacher as authority represents the truth to them. They observe beauty in gestures, in general conduct and again in the words spoken around them. Goodness is experienced through the sympathies and antipathies engendered by those in authority. These few words give the main direction for moral education during the age between the second dentition and puberty. If we attempt to give the child abstract moral values upon its way, we will encounter inner resentment, not because of any inherent shortcomings in the child, but because of a natural response. On the other hand, if we can create moral pictures for the child, perhaps taken from the animal kingdom, letting animals appear symbolically in a moral light, and possibly extending this approach to include all of nature, then we can work for the good of the child, particularly during the seventh, eighth, and ninth years of life. If we create vivid, colorful human characters out of our own imagination and allow our own approval or disapproval of their deeds to shine through our descriptions, and if we allow our sympathies and antipathies to grow into definite feelings in the children that will lead them over into a more general moral judgment of good and evil, then our picture of the world cultivates ageappropriate moral judgements based in perceptions and feelings. But this particular way of presenting the world is of the essence. During the first years, the child has learned from direct perception. As we reach the primary school age, whatever comes toward the child, to strengthen a moral feeling leading to moral judgment, must have passed through the medium of those in authority. Now the teacher and educator must stand before the child as representatives of the order of the world. The child meets the teachers in order to receive the teachers’ picture of the world, colored by their sympathies and antipathies. Through the feelings with which children meet the teachers, and through instinctual life, children themselves must find what is good and what is evil. The students have to receive the world through the mediation of the educator. The children are happy who, thanks to a teacher’s interpretation of the world can form their own relationship to the world. Those who have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed such a relationship with their teachers in childhood have gained something of value for the rest of their lives. People who say that children should learn intellectually and through their own observations, free from the influence of authority, speak like flagrant amateurs; for we do not teach children merely for the years during which they are under our care, but to benefit their whole lives. And the various life periods, right up to the point of death, are mutually interrelated in very interesting ways. If, because of their teachers’ natural authority, pupils have once accepted subject matter they could not yet fully comprehend with their powers of reasoning—for the intellectual grasp belongs to a later stage of development and works destructively if enforced too early—if they have accepted something purely out of love for their teachers, such content remains deeply preserved in their souls. At the age of thirty-five or forty perhaps, or possibly even later in life, it may happen that they speak of the following strange experience: Only now, after having lived through so many joys, pains, and disappointments, only now do I see the light of what I accepted at the age of eight out of my respect for my teacher’s authority. This meaning now resurfaces, mingling with the many life experiences and the widening of horizons that have occurred meanwhile. What does such an experience mean for later life? A sensitive and empathetic psychology tells us that such events give off life-invigorating forces even into old age. Education gains new meaning from knowing that such an expansion of childhood experiences into older ages brings with it a new stimulus for life: we educate not only to satisfy the short-term needs of the child while at school, but also to satisfy the needs of life as a whole. The seeds laid into the child’s soul must be allowed to grow with the child. Hence we must be aware that whatever we teach must be capable of further growth. Nothing is worse than our pedantic insistence that the child learn rigid, sharply outlined concepts. One could compare this approach with that of forcing the child’s delicate hands into an iron glove to stop them from growing. We must not give the child fixed or finished definitions, but concepts capable of expansion and growth. The child’s soul needs to be equipped with the kind of seeds that can continue to grow during the whole of the life to come. For this growth to take place, it is not enough just to apply certain principles in one’s teaching; one has to know how to live with the child. It is especially important for the moral and ethical aspect of education that we remember, for the ages between seven and fourteen, that the child’s moral judgment should be approached only through an appeal to feelings called forth by verbal pictures illustrating the essentials of an inherent morality. What matters at this age is that the child should develop sympathy for the moral and antipathy for the immoral. To give children moral admonitions would be going against their nature, for they do not penetrate the souls of children. The entire future moral development is determined by those things that, through forming sympathies, become transformed into moral judgments. One single fact will show the importance of the teacher’s right relationship to the child with regard to moral development. If one can educate with a discriminating, yet practical, sense of psychology, one will notice that, at a certain time around the ninth or tenth year (the exact age may vary in individual cases), the children’s relationship to the world—an outcome of sympathies and antipathies that can be cultivated—will be such that they forget themselves. Despite a certain “physical egotism” (to give it a name), the child will still be fully open to environmental influences. Just as teachers need clear insight into the child’s developmental stages when they use observational methods in object lessons with children of nine or ten, such insight is particularly important when it comes to moral education. If one pays sufficient attention to the more individual traits emerging in pupils, an interesting phenomenon can be observed at that age: the awareness that the child has a special need for help from the teacher. Sometimes a few words spoken by the child can be like a call for help. They can be the appropriate signal for a perceptive teacher, who now must find the right words to help the child over the hump. For the child is passing through a critical stage, when everything may depend on a few words spoken by the teacher to reestablish the right relationship between pupil and teacher. What is happening at this time? By wrestling with language, the young person becomes aware, very consciously, for the first time that “There is a difference between myself and the world.” (This is unlike the time during the first seven-year period when, unconsciously, the child first learned to refer to the self as “I.”) The child now strongly demands a new orientation for body, soul, and spirit vis-à-vis the world. This awareness happens between the ninth and the tenth year. Again, unconsciously, the child has a remarkable experience in the form of all kinds of seemingly unrelated sentiments, feelings, and will impulses, which have no outward relationship with the behavior. The experience is: “Here before me stands my teacher who, as authority, opens the world for me. I look into the world through the medium of this authority. But is this authority the right one for me? Am I receiving the right picture of the world?” Please note that I am not saying this thought is a conscious one. All this happens subtly in the realm of the child’s feelings. Yet this time is decisive for determining whether or not the child can feel the continued trust in the teacher’s authority necessary for a healthy development until the onset of puberty. And this experience causes a certain inner unrest and nervousness in the child. The teacher has to find the right words to safeguard the child’s continued confidence and trust. For together with this consolidation of trust, the moral character of the child also becomes consolidated. At first it was only latent in the child; now it becomes inwardly more anchored and the child attains inner firmness. Children grasp, right into the physical organism, something that they had perceived thus far as a self-evident part of their own individual self, as I described earlier. Contemporary physiology, consisting on the one side of anthropology and on the other of an abstract psychology, is ignorant of the most fundamental facts. One can say that, until the second dentition, all organic formations and functions proceed from the nerve-and-sense system. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the child’s physical fitness or weakness depends on the good functioning of the rhythmic system, on the breathing and blood circulation. Between the ninth and the tenth birthdays, what previously was still anchored primarily in the breathing, in the upper part of the organism, basically shifts over to the blood circulation; this is the time when the wonderful number relationship of one to four is being developed, in the approximately eighteen breaths and the seventy-two pulse beats per minute. This relationship between breathing and blood circulation becomes established at this time of life. However, it is only the outer expression of deep processes going on in the child’s soul, and the reinforcement of the trust between teacher and child must become part of these processes, for through this trust the consolidation of the child’s inner being also occurs. These interactions between physiological and moral development must be described in detail if one wishes to speak of moral education and of the relationship between pedagogy and morality. As an educator, whether or not I am aware of this particular point in a child’s life will determine whether or not I exercise a beneficial or a harmful influence for the rest of a person’s life. I should like to show, as a comparison, how things done at this stage continue to affect all of the rest of life. You may have noticed that there are people who, when they grow old, exert an unusual influence on those around them. That there are such people is generally known. Such people don’t even need to say much when they are with others. Their mere presence is enough to bring what one may call an “air of blessing” to those around them. A grace emanates from them that brings about a relaxed and balanced atmosphere. If one has the patience and energy to trace the origin of this gift, one will find that it has developed out of a seed that came into being during childhood through a deeply felt respect for the authority of someone in charge. One could also describe it by saying that, in such a case, the child’s moral judgment had been enhanced by a feeling of veneration that gradually reached the level of religious experience. If a child, between the change of teeth and puberty, experiences the feeling of reverence for certain people, reverence tinged even with a genuine religious feeling that lifts moral feelings into the light of piety, expressed in sincere prayer, then out of this childlike prayer grows the gift of blessing in old age, the gift of radiating grace to one’s fellow human beings. Using pictorial language, one could say: Hands that have learned to pray in childhood have the gift of bestowing blessing in old age. These words, though symbolic and pictorial, nevertheless correspond to the fact that seeds planted in childhood can have an effect right to the end of life. Now, for an example how the stages of human life are interrelated; one example in the moral realm is, as I said earlier, that the child’s ability to form mental images in the thinking process develops along a continuous line. Only memory will take on a different character after the change of teeth. Language, on the other hand, becomes somehow inverted. Between the second dentition and puberty, the young person develops an entirely different relationship to language. This new relationship can be properly served by bringing to the child at this time the grammar and logic inherent in language. One can tackle practically every aspect of language if, instead of rashly bringing to consciousness the unconscious element of language from early childhood, one makes this translation in a way that considers the child. But what about the third relationship: the young child’s creation of an individual equilibrium with the external world after having learned to walk? Most people interpret the child’s attempt to use the legs for the first time in a purely external and mechanistic way. It is not generally known, for example, that our ability for spatial imagination and our capacity for mathematical imagery is an upward projection of our limbs’ potential movements into the intellectual sphere; in this projection, the head experiences, as mental activity, what is experienced in our limbs as movement. A deeply hidden soul element of the human being lives especially in this system of movement, a deep soul element linked to outer material forces. After crawling on hands and knees, the child assumes the vertical position, lifting vertically the bodily axis, which in the case of the animals remains parallel to the Earth’s surface. This upright achievement of the child is the physical expression of the moral potential for human will forces, which lift the human being above the level of the animals. One day a comprehensive physiology, which is at the same time anthroposophy, will learn to understand that moral forces express themselves in the way a child performs physical movements in space. What the child achieves by assuming the upright posture and thus becoming free of the forces that keep the animal’s spine parallel to the Earth’s surface, what the child achieves by rising into a state of equilibrium in space, is the physical expression of the moral nature of its will energy. It is this achievement that makes the human individual into a moral being. The objection may be raised that during sleep the position of the human spine is also parallel to the Earth’s surface. However I am speaking here about the general human organization, and about the way spatial dimensions are organized into the human being. Through an accurate assessment of these matters, within this upright position the physical expression of human morality can be seen, which allows the human countenance to gaze freely into the world. Let me compare what actually happens in the child with a certain phenomenon in nature. In the southern region of old Austria, (now part of Italy) there is a river named the Poik, whose source is in the mountains. Suddenly this river disappears, completely vanishes from sight, and surfaces again later. What appears as the second river does not have its own source, but after its reemergence, people call it the Unz. The Unz disappears again, and resurfaces as a river called The Laibach. In other words, this river flows, unseen, in the depths of the Earth for part of its journey. Similarly, what the child has absorbed from its surroundings in its early years rests unperceived during childhood sleep. During the first years of life, when the child is unconsciously given over to moral forces inherent in the environment, the child acquires the ability to use the limbs in an upright position, thus becoming free of animality. What the child puts into this newly won skill is not noticeable between the change of teeth and puberty, but reappears as freedom in the making of moral judgements, as the freedom of human morality in the will sphere. If the teacher has cultivated the right moral sympathies and antipathies in the child at primary school age—without, however, being too heavy-handed—then, during the time before puberty, the most important aspects of the will can continue their “underground existence.” The child’s individual will, built on inner freedom, will eventually become completely a part of a human sense of responsibility, and will reappear after puberty so that the young person can be received as a free fellow human being. If the educator has refrained from handing down interdicts, and has instead planted sympathies and antipathies in the pupils’ emotional baggage, but without infringing upon the moral will now appearing, the young person can transform the gifts of sympathies and antipathies according to individual needs. After puberty, the young person can transform what was given by others into moral impulses, which now come freely from individuality. This is how to develop, out of real empathy with the human being, what needs to be done at each age and stage. If one does so properly between the seventh and fourteenth years by allowing moral judgements to mature in the pupil’s life of feeling, what was given to the child properly with the support of authority will be submerged into the human sphere of free will. The human being can become free only after having been properly guided in the cultivation of moral sympathies and antipathies. If one proceeds in this manner regarding moral education, one stands beside the pupils so that one is only the motivator for their own self-education. One gives them what they are unconsciously asking for, and then only enough for them to become responsible for their own selves at the appropriate age, without any risk or danger to themselves. The difficulty regarding moral education to which I drew your attention at the beginning of today’s meeting, is solved in this way. One must work side by side with one’s pupils, unselfishly and objectively. In other words, the aim should be never to leave behind a relic of one’s own brand of morality in the psychological makeup of the pupils; one should try instead to allow them to develop their own sympathies and antipathies for what they consider morally right or wrong. This approach will enable them to grow rightly into moral impulses and will give them a sense of freedom at the appropriate age. The point is to stand beside the child on the basis of an intimate knowledge and art of psychology, which is both an art of life and an art of spiritual endeavor. This will do justice not only to artistic, but also to moral education. But one should have due respect for the human being and be able to rightly evaluate a child’s human potential. Then one’s education will become a moral education, which means that the highest claim, the highest demand, for the question of morality and education is contained in the following answer: The right relationship between education and morality is found in a moral pedagogy whereby the entire art of education is itself a moral deed. The morality inherent in an art of education is the basis for a moral pedagogy. What I have said so far applies to education in general, but it is nearest to our heart at the present time, when an understandable and justified youth movement has been growing apace. I will not attempt to characterize this youth movement properly in just a few words. For many of you here, I have done so already in various other places. But I wish to express my conviction that, if the older generation of teachers and educators knows how to meet the moral impulses of the younger generation on the basis of an art of education as outlined here, this problem of modern youth will find its proper solution. For in the final resort, the young do not wish to stand alone; they really want to cooperate with the older generation. But this cooperation needs to happen so that what they receive from their elders is different, something other, from what they can themselves bring; they need to be able to perceive it as the thing which their soul needs and which the older people can give. Contemporary social life has created conditions regarding this question of the younger generation that I would characterize in this way: It is often said that the old should retain their previous youthful forces in order to get on better with the young. Today (present company, as always, excluded) the older generation appears excessively youthful, because its members have forgotten how to grow old properly. Their souls and spirits no longer know how to grow into their changed bodies. They carry into their aging bodies what they used to do in their young days, but the human garment of life no longer fits. If now the old and the young meet, the ensuing lack of understanding is not caused by old age as such, but, on the contrary, because the old have not grown old properly and, consequently, cannot be of much help to the young. The young expect that the old should have grown old properly, without appearing childish. When today’s young meet their elders, they find them not very different from themselves. They are left with the impression that, although the old people have learned more in life, they do not seem to understand life more deeply, to be wiser. The young feel that the old have not used their age to become mature, that they have remained at the same human level as the young themselves. Youth expects that the old should have grown old in the right way. For this concept to enter social life properly, a practical art of education is needed, which ensures that the seeds planted in education bear fruit right into ripe old age, as I have described it in various examples. One has to be able to unfold the appropriate life forces for each stage of life. One must know how to grow old. When the old understand how to grow old properly, they are full of inner freshness, whereas if they have become gray and wrinkled while remaining childishly immature, they cannot give anything to the young that the latter don’t have already. This sheds some light on the present situation. One must only look at these things objectively. Basically, those who find themselves in this situation are quite innocent of the problems involved. What matters is that we tackle this most important and topical human problem by looking closely at our contemporary education, and in particular at the moral factor in education. Coming to terms with it is of great import, not only from the educational point of view, but for the entire social life. When all is said and done, the moral education of the human being is the crown of all education and teaching. In Faust, Goethe puts the following strange words into the mouth of the Creator-God:
It is worth noting that although Goethe let these words be spoken by the Lord God Himself, pedantic minds could not resist nitpicking over them. They said, “‘The good person, in darkest aberration ... is conscious...’ ”; this is a contradiction in terms, for the darkest aberration is purely instinctive and certainly not conscious. How could Goethe write such words in his Faust?” So much for erudite barbarians. Well, I believe that Goethe knew very well what he had written in this sentence. He wanted to express the idea that, for those who look at the moral life without prejudice, morality is connected with the darkest depths of the human being, and that in this realm one approaches the most difficult area of the human being. In today’s meeting, we saw for ourselves the difficulty of approaching moral issues in practical education. In these areas the darkest realms of the human being are encountered. Goethe clearly recognized this, but he also recognized that what the moral person can achieve only through the brightest rays of the spirit light, has to be attained in the darkest depths of the soul. I would like to think that Goethe’s words consecrate the moral aspect of education, for what do they really say? They express a deep truth of life, into which I wish to condense all that has been said about the meaning of moral education. I therefore will sum up in the sense of Goethe’s words what I outlined for you today by concluding as follows: If you wish to enter the land of knowledge, you must follow the Spirit-light of day. You must work your way out of the darkness into the light. If you wish to find your way to the land of art, you must work your way, if not to the dazzling light of the Sun itself, at least into the colored brightness that Spirit-light radiates into the world. For in this light and in this light alone is everything turned into art. However, it would be sad if, before becoming a morally good person, I first had to work my way toward these two goals. To become a morally good person, the innermost kernel of the human being has to be taken hold of down to its deepest recesses, for that is where the right orientation is needed. And the following must be said too: True, in our search for knowledge, we must work our way toward the light, and the pursuit of art means striving toward the colorful light of day; but it is equally true that, in the moral life, the human being who has found the right orientation can be a good person without light, and also without brightness; it is possible to be a good person through all the darkness and obscurity of life. If, as “the good person,” one is “conscious of the right path still,” one will be able to find the right way through all existing darkness, into the light and into all the colorful brightness of the world. |